HUMAN CONFESSIONS 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 



BY 
FRANK CRANE 



** Leave me! there 's something come into my thought 
That must and shall be sung high and aloof. 
Safe from the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass's hoof." 

Ben Jonson. 




CHICAGO 

FORBES & COMPANY 

1911 



Copyright, 191 i. By 
Forbes and Company 



©Ci.A2959l3 



I WOULD like these thoughts to be read and 
accepted in the sense of being purely human, 
reflecting no cult, college or creed. They are 
not written to convert anybody, or for any end 
except the pleasure of utterance. 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 



TO YOU 

EVERY speaker before an audience, every 
writer for publication — In short, every one 
who addresses the people generally — has some 
sort of Ideal personage toward whom he alms. 
I will tell you mine. 

My reader, who Is before my mind's eye In 
every utterance I make. Is a man who Is old 
enough to have suffered, and still young enough 
to have faith. 

He does not read to acquire Information, but 
to find something that shall stimulate his own 
thought and feeling. Hence It Is a matter of 
Indifference to him whether he agrees with me. 
He wants me to Interest him — not to soothe him. 

He values various Institutions, such as parties, 
churches, classes and the like, but he never allows 
them to Interfere with the freedom of his mind. 

7 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

I am not to him a friend nor an enemy, a 
teacher, a preacher, nor an antagonist: I am a 
chance acquaintance whom he will consort with 
only so long as he can get anything worth while 
from me. He honors my position as a bystander. 

He is offended only at these things: vulgarity, 
flippancy, intolerance, platitudes, insincerity, a de- 
sire to please him, repetition, too many words. 

He wants me to be unafraid, gentle, honest; to 
say what is my own genuine private opinion, to 
say it as concisely as possible. 

Sometimes he marks a book and sends it to a 
friend. 

Oh, reader, "whom having not seen I love," 
the purest joy I know is to feel your eyes on my 
page, to feel your soul stir a little against my soul. 



DANGER 

RIGHT by the side of every life Is Danger. 
It Is our Invisible, ever-present companion. 
It Is the tall, dark angel that Destiny appoints us 
to make our character. It Is the one thing we 
avoid. It Is the one thing we need. Wherever 
you find any form of life, whether fishes, birds, 
worms, Insects, plants or human beings, there Is 
the Immanence of wounds, disease and death. Ex- 
istence itself is " the valley of the shadow of 
death." And this forces upon us the conclusion 
that Nature cares very little for our safety and 
very much for the quality of our fiber. She does 
not mind if we die or are hurt, but she is anxious 
to keep up our courage. The air is full of mi- 
crobes; our food swarms with germs; our blood 
and our environment are thick with things to cor- 
rupt our morals. The way from the cradle to the 
grave Is past a thousand batteries. And at last 
some marksman gets us. Nature intends us to 
die. And you will miss the whole meaning of life 
if you do not learn that the true aim is not at all 

9 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

to escape pain, to be " saved " from this or that, 
but it is simply not to be afraid. The overcoming 
of fear is the enfranchisement of the soul. " To 
him that overcometh I will give the Morning 
Star." "Oh, toiling hands of mortals!" says 
Robert Louis Stevenson, " Oh, unwearied feet, 
traveling ye know not whither! Little do ye 
know your own blessedness; for to travel hope- 
fully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true 
success is labor." 



10 



SEPARATION 

EVERY organization which is based upon the 
theory that Its members are better than the 
rest of the world is essentially Immoral. What- 
ever is exclusive is wrong. The end of segrega- 
tion is always hypocrisy. The consummate 
flower of the " chosen people " was the Pharisee. 
The elect and Illuminated few are humbugs. All 
goodness abides In the common mass of men, as 
all water comes from the ocean. The heart of 
the whole nation is truer and more to be trusted 
than the heart of any one saint. The world must 
be lovable, else The Book would not say: 
For God so loved the world." The world Is 
wiser than the wisest man ; humanity speaks slowly, 
but there is finality and utter truth in Its judgments. 
The world, all men and women, are happy. The 
only genuine happiness Is that which Is of the com- 
mon lot. The staple joys, the everyday, usable, 
inexhaustible joys, that do not wear out, are those 
pleasures we have in common with every class of 
men. There is vastly more quickening and life, 

II 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

for instance, in the liquor that you get for nothing 
out of the kitchen faucet than in the kind that costs 
you five dollars a quart. And do you know why 
The People in their entirety are so good and 
wise and lovely and happy? It is a secret, but I 
will tell you. It is because The People are 
God's Other Self. 



12 



^ THE AURA 

THE subtlest and most necessary pleasure Is 
the giving of pleasure to another. It is of 
best quality when It is unconscious, and the pleas- 
ure we cause comes not from any deliberate inten- 
tion to be agreeable, but Is merely the forthputting 
of one's personality. Every soul is like a bit of 
radium, ceaselessly sending out dynamic rays. 
Around me is a highly electrified spiritual aura, a 
force of such a character that only another human 
being can be affected by It. Each other human 
being has a similar envelope of psychic exhalation. 
These various auras have their attractions and re- 
pulsions. By my presence some are repelled, some 
remain cold and some are excited Into a pleasurable 
glow. When another person Is enkindled by me 
he loves me. If I am not enkindled in return, his 
love dies by and by. Souls feed on souls. Where 
there Is a constant Interplay of personality-force 
there Is abiding love. To live In contact with a 
soul you love, Is-to glow in the serenest and sweet- 
est type of joy. There Is no marriage except there 

13 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

be this mutual radiation. Jesus touched the 
psychological gist of friendship and love when he 
said: " If ye abide in me, and I in you." 



14 



THE WORLD'S GREATEST NEED 

IF I were omnipotent and wanted to do the very 
best thing possible for humanity there are sev- 
eral things I would certainly not do. I would not 
give everybody money, for if each of us had a mil- 
lion dollars we would all be no better off than we 
are now. I would not give the world a perfect 
system of government, for good laws work mis- 
chief with bad subjects. I would not abolish sick- 
ness and the passing of life, for we learn more 
about the higher values of life from these two 
than from any other sources. I would not reveal 
at once all the secrets of science which normally 
it will require centuries to discover, for the best 
part of knowledge is the search for it. I would 
not disclose now all the useful inventions to be 
made in the next thousand years, for inventions 
do not come till the race is ready for them. 

What I would do Is this: I would send Into 
the world a great, wise, sweet and most manly man 
and let him stay just long enough for a few to fall 
In love with him and to get a firm impression of 

15 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

his character. His fame would surely spread 
through generations; we should love and adore 
him, and grow gradually like him. Thus, it 
seems to me, I should do the most good and the 
least harm. 



i6 



THE SKY 

\ LWAYS above our huge moiling city is the 
m\. still sky. The sky clasps the restless earth 
in its arms as a mother holds a fretful child to 
her bosom. Just to look up is to receive a revela- 
tion of the vast quietude in which our noisy world 
floats. I would have my life like Ruysdael's pic- 
ture of " A Distant View of Haarlem," where 
there are some six inches of landscape and eighteen 
inches of sky. The more of that infinite azure we 
can get into our feeling, the more we let it top and 
dominate the little present, the nobler shall we be. 
It is when we look down and about us, and are ab- 
sorbed in the petty business and schemes of the mo- 
ment, that we despair and call ourselves worms of 
the dust. But when we raise our eyes to that 
miracle of majesty above, sometimes of gentlest 
unflecked blue, sometimes dotted with flocks of 
lamblike clouds, now thick and close with mist, and 
again remotely dark, sown with twinkling worlds, 
now full of rushing war-clouds, booming thunders, 
and fierce, swift lightnings, and then soft and ten- 

17 



HtTMAN CONFESSIONS 

der and still as the holy adoration of a nun ; never 
the same for two hours together, but always so 
wide and wonderful and great; when we regard 
this " majestlcal roof " of the theater to which our 
lives are appointed we are moved to play the man. 
I wish it might be said of me : " The stars have 
merged into his soul." 



i8 



\ 



THE REFORMER 

AVAST deal of unhapplness might be avoided 
if people would grasp the truth that mar- 
riage is not a reformatory institution. Much also 
would be added to the sum of human joy if we 
would cease using friendships as a means of im- 
proving our friends. Our affections are too seri- 
ous, too precious, ,to be degraded to the level of 
moral purpose. To spread whatever peculiar gos- 
pel we may be burning with may be a very noble 
business, but plain love is good in itself, and to 
sacrifice it on any altar, however holy, is to destroy 
what everybody and God know is good, for some 
end about which doctors disagree. 

Friends are to be prized for what they are, and 
not for what they are not. The woman who docs 
not love her husband's faults does not love him, 
but some phantom of her own creation. If I love 
you I do not want you made over, revised and 
amended to suit my notion of what you ought to 
be; I want you just as you are, and it Is doubtful 
if I can love you so much when you get to heaven 
and lose all your human imperfections. 

19 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

If we must do good to folks, If we feel it Is our 
bounden duty to uplift somebody and rescue the 
perishing, let us by all means spare our loved ones 
and go out and uplift some disagreeable people. 
And, after all, when will we learn that the 
mightiest Influence we can exert comes from what 
we are and not from what we do or say? If you 
are anything you cannot keep your friend from be- 
coming like you. And If you are not, why preach ? 
" What you are," said Emerson, " talks so loud I 
cannot hear what you say." 



20 



COMMERCIALISM 

IT is the fashion to curse our day because It Is 
given up to money-making. Cold, hard com- 
mercialism Is said to be destroying the good old 
customs and graces. As a matter of fact, the busi- 
ness of money-making Is the most civilized occupa- 
tion the race ever took up. Commercialism has 
ended slavery, abated war, limited and abolished 
thrones and tyranny, ousted superstition, and de- 
veloped the Individual virtues of self-control, econ- 
omy and sobriety. Compare It with feudalism. It 
Is less picturesque but more merciful ; with aristoc- 
racy. It has less display but more justice; with re- 
ligious rule, It has less emotion but more liberty. 
Trusts may be as greedy and godless as any form 
of special privilege that ever oppressed man, but 
there Is this to say of them : they can as a rule 
thrive only upon the prosperity and never upon 
the poverty of the masses. It Is the rising im- 
portance of profit-getting that Is the severest prac- 
tical check upon militarism. As an Institution 
money-making must play fair in the long run or 

21 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

it will destroy itself; no business house can con- 
tinue on any permanent basis except truth-telling. 
Compare this with the ancient frauds and sacred, 
protected, legalized injustice of the hereditary no- 
bility. When wc shall have once worked out some 
feasible plan for justly distributing profits, when 
we shall have done away with all special advan- 
tages to certain people, Including tariff and in- 
heritance, wc shall find universal working for 
wages the most equitable arrangement under which 
the race can live ; we shall achieve the true brother- 
hood of man. 



22 



THE PARADOX 

DNE of the strange things about life Is that 
the things we struggle and pray for often 
prove empty and disappointing when we get them, 
and the things we dread often unfold, when they 
arrive, and disclose the greatest treasures. We 
shun sickness, for Instance; It comes, let us say. 
In spite of us; and we emerge from our sickroom 
as they who have visited the temple, for we have 
learned wonderful, ethereal facts about ourselves 
we never would have suspected In good health. 

Weakness, poverty, failure, disappointment, 
heart-break, bereavement — these are somehow 
forms which the Highest Truth about life seems 
to take. I suppose the realization (not the knowl- 
edge) of God Is about the supremest human ex- 
perience; and It Is significant that we never seem 
to feel the touch of God except In some sort of 
shadow. The loveliest grace of any man or 
woman Is real humility; near and akin to this are 
loyalty and courage. And these virtues are rarely 
visible In a life until It Is crushed and bruised by 

23 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

the hammers of adversity. The noblest force 
entered the human race through the Cross. The 
stricken man, finding all gone he longed for — 
health, fortune, friends — discovers himself mirac- 
ulously recompensed; In the heart of sorrow is a 
surprising joy. 

When Socrates had been condemned to death 
he was discussing with his friends the singular 
fact that his " daimon," or familiar spirit, which 
had heretofore warned him of every approaching 
calamity, had given him no warning of death. 
" What, then, do you suppose to be the reason of 
this? " he said. " I will tell you. I think It Is 
that what is about to happen to me Is a good 
thing; and we must have been mistaken when we 
supposed death to be an evil." I 



24 



LIFE AND LOVE 

AFTER all there is only one thing in which 
we are all interested; it is — life. All our 
various forms of activity are experiments in life. 
Whether we eat, drink or sleep, go to the play 
or to the church, gratify or deny ourselves, laugh 
or weep, it is all to get another flavor of life. 
The sinners are the overcurious. Children are 
profligates with life. Old age will cling to it 
through any pain. 

" Gnaw my withers, rack my bones ! 
Life, mere life, for all atones." 

That is why we love love. It Is because love 
is the very essence and pure substance of life. All 
else is diluted. The activities of business, the 
musings of philosophy, the ecstasies of religion, 
the thrill of adventure, the stir of exercise, the 
gratification of the senses, all of these are but 
brilliant beads strung on the one scarlet string of 
love. Without love they would fall from us. 
All about us, in the sea and on the land, nature 

25 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

pours her abundance of living things, every crevice 
has its habitant, and green things growing crowd 
the earth. We get a glimpse of what it all means 
when we love, for then nothing but a universe 
drenched with life can express us. " There is one 
word," wrote Maurice de Guerin, " which is the 
God of my imagination, the tyrant, I ought 
rather to say, that fascinates it, lures it onward, 
and will finally carry it I know not where; the 
word — life." 



26 



X 

FAITH 

TO get things done an ounce of faith is worth 
a ton of experience. Kipling recounts how 
a battle was won by the fool raw recruits, the 
boys who stormed the fort like lunatics, while the 
old and wise soldiers knew better and held back. 

William Carey, the father of modern missions, 
was called a " dreamer who dreams that he is 
dreaming." The movement he inaugurated is 
one of the marvels of human achievement. He 
had something better than wisdom; he had faith. 

There are plenty of people to do the possible; 
you can hire them at forty dollars a month. The 
prizes are for those who perform the impossible. 
If a thing can be done, experience and skill can do 
it; if a thing cannot be done, only faith can do it. 

And it is the quality of faith that counts. It 
Is not of so much importance what you believe as 
how you believe. For faith Is the peculiar elixir 
of youth. When we grow old, and accumulate 
experience, and learn our limitations, and become 
wise and cautious. Nature kindly removes us as 

27 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

being of no further use for her mysterious pui 
poses. Whoever has faith is young, no matte 
how old he is ; whoever has lost faith is old even a 
twenty-one. 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When duty whispers low, Thou Must! 
The youth replies, I can ! " 



28 



CARRYING THE LANTERN BEHIND 
THEM 

EVERY great soul threading the tangled 
ways of life makes more contentment for 
others than he gets for himself. In fact most 
of the comfortable things of existence are given 
us by others; most thorns and tragedies are of 
our own preparation. A myriad unseen hands 
labor in fields and mines, sail ships and handle 
trains to bring to my table bread and salt, knife 
and meat, to put coals in my grate and a coat on 
my back; but it is I alone who fare forth to sin 
or to pray, to fall or to triumph. 

Every day I take the usufruct of Socrates's wis- 
dom, of Washington's patriotism, of Jesus's teach- 
ing. These things descend upon me quiet as dew, 
and refreshing and calmly wholesome. They pro- 
tect, cheer and strengthen me. And then how 
little of all this gentle good these benefactors got 
for their own comfort I When I consider the 
Heroes, who overturned ancient frauds, broke 
tyrannies and lightened the souls in darkness, I am 

29 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

reminded of the lines in Dante's Purgatory, where 
Statlus says to Vergil: "Thou art like one who 
walks by night, carrying a lantern behind him, so 
that he gets no good from it himself, but helps 
those who follow." 



30 



THE WASTE OF HATE 

THERE is so much waste In hate. I have a 
letter from a man who does not like me. 
He has read some articles of mine and thoroughly 
disapproves of them and of me. His ire reached 
to the point where he simply had to tell me how he 
thought I was doing harm and cumbering the 
ground generally. 

Now the odd thing about it is that if this man 
and I — and I do not know him — were alone on 
an Atlantic liner, and got acquainted, and swapped 
stories and compared opinions, we should beyond 
a doubt grow quite chummy. " Don't introduce 
me to that man," said Sydney Smith once; "I 
feel it my duty to hate him, and you can't hate 
a man when you know him." 

As a matter of fact, wc never hate men. The 
human soul, any soul, is so Intrinsically lovely that 
to get acquainted is to fall In love. That Is the 
reason God "so loves the world"; It Is because 
He knows souls through and through. 

What we really hate are classes, opinions, castes, 
31 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

groups and such like appanages of men. Hate 
runs between Jew and Gentile, Catholic and 
Protestant, Capital and Labor, White and Black, 
and so on. But the whole business rests upon 
ignorance, ignorance of the real man through 
overknowledge of the pigeonhole in which he be- 
longs. 

I suppose there is some good in organizations, 
sects and shibboleths, but I love humanity so, I 
am so anxious to reach man, that I am impatient 
at all the cases, hoods and houses he has made for 
his defense. 

Hate is waste. It is a by-product of generali- 
zation. To classify men is to lay the ground for 
hate. As long as we keep our eye on the Individual 
we shall love. 



32 



SELF-EXPRESSION 

THE best thing for you is self-expression. 
The way to develop what is good In you and 
the way to cure what is bad in you is to let it 
out. Many deadly microbes are ripened in the 
mind by lack of ventilation. 

If you are nervous, go out in the back yard and 
scream. A child cries, and gets over it; we sup- 
press, and remain gloomy. If you are angry 
against a man, write him a letter and abuse him 
and his ancestors, say every mean thing you can 
think of, and then burn the letter. Especially in 
the realm of art self-expression is the one virtue. 
All that is good In your painting, your statue, your 
book, your acting, your oratory Is what of self you 
put In. 

The world Is, at the last, interested In what you 
are, and cares little for anything you have picked 
up. All your knowledge and your tricks and quo- 
tations are chaff. Your sole contribution to the 
sum of things Is yourself. You can do what is 
in you, no more, no less. . Education and culture 

33 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

do merely " cast up the highway and gather up the 
stones " so that this self may run free and not 
stumble. 

Most people, ordinary folks, are clogged with 
fear, Imitation, stage fright, and are perpetually 
smothered by others ; the genius, the artist and the 
wise man are those whose self flows naturally and 
unafraid. All we can add to the wealth of 
humanity is merely the expression of our own per- 
sonality. And fear not, neither of offending God 
nor wronging man ; for — 

" To thine own self be true, 
And it must follow, as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man." 



34 



^ 



A 



BETWEEN ONE MAN AND ONE 
WOMAN 

THE penalty for uncleanness of thought Is 
that the soul's eye shall be put out. In 
some way Nature has placed in the holy of holies 
of life the ark of the covenant between one man 
and one woman. It Is a great mystery, but It is 
a truth none the less, this subtle connection between 
spiritual vision and sexual integrity. 

The high joy of existence is precisely the ability 
to see those rare tints of nobility and glory that 
hover about the commonplace. To perceive 
these gleams makes our career here below strong, 
rich and worth while; not to perceive them, to 
have lost them, to doubt or to deny them. Is to re- 
duce life to the level of that Augustan age, of 
which Matthew Arnold wrote : 

" On that hard pagan world disgust 
And secret loathing fell ; 
Deep weariness and sated lust 
Made human life a hell." 

35 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Purity seems a cold word, but It Is only so to 
stupid persons who do not understand how 
passion can be pure. Ignorance Is not purity, and 
celibacy Is not chastity. Our wives and mothers 
arc as chaste as our daughters. Purity Is a qual- 
ity of passion. To have passion without loyalty 
is, as Carlyle says, " to burn away, in mad waste, 
the divine aromas and plainly celestial elements 
from our existence; to make the soul itself hard, 
Impious and barren, and to forfeit the finest mag- 
nanimity, depth of insight and spiritual potency." 
Or, as a greater than Carlyle said: " Blessed are 
the pure In heart, for they shall see God ! " 



3^ 



WIGWAGGING 

i^tJTMIAT man," said Voltaire, " who shall ex- 
X plain why the emotion of pleasure causes 
the zygomatic muscle to draw the corners of the 
mouth up toward the ears may indeed be entitled 
to call himself a philosopher." But the problem 
is not so hard. One spirit Is signaling another 
by a code mutually agreed upon, as one man-of- 
war wigwags to another. A strange, hidden thing, 
this 

" Animula, vagula, blandula, 
Hospes comesque corporis, 

— this vague guest and comrade of the body we 
call the soul." None has seen the real Me. 
Everyone Is really a concealed ghost. I look at 
you, as one gazes at a house from the street and 
wonders who is within. Your eyes are windows. 
Sometimes you light the lamp, the windows shine, 
I know you are happy. Shall I ever see You? 
Shall I ever know You, and not merely guess at 
you by lips and hair and hands? Now we talk as 
one in Chicago telephones to one In Boston, we 

37 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

love as dwellers upon the mountain catch the fra- 
grance of flowers in the valley. You escape me. 
We walk hand in hand, but You may be for all 
that in Cathay or Ispahan. Eye looks Into eye, 
but the deep secrets of the soul lie covered. 
Poor, little, solitary soul, caged in this body, hear- 
ing bird calls in the distance, but never really 
knowing its kind! Happy is the man who once 
or twice can say, in the press of alien lives, " Some 
one hath touched me ! " 



38 



THE SOIL OF HEROISM 

THIS is the age of heroes. Because it is the 
age of money-power, public corruption, 
luxury, greed, and vast, deadening respectabilities. 
Only where you find the solidarities of society 
massed against the pure, aspiring soul do you find 
great souls. Battle makes brave men, danger 
makes fearless men, terrible temptation develops 
noble women. Unjust social conditions, poverty 
and unrighteous wealth are the muck soil where 
grow the most beautiful flowers of individual 
altruism. If the millennium ever comes in which 
wealth will be distributed in equity and all the 
environment of men will be conducive to virtue 
we shall have only a race of childlike innocents. 
The eras of great wrong are the eras of noble, 
virile, forth-putting souls. Our friend the devil 
may mow down the weak as grass, but he can only 
nourish those who have the fiber of greatness. I 
am not so bold as to fancy that I can solve what 
Archbishop Whately called " the problem of the 
ages " — that is, the reason for the existence of 

39 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

evil; but certain it is that some light Is thrown 
upon it when we assume that human beings are not 
put here to be happy, but to become great. 



4-0 



y 



THE FRIENDSHIP OF WOMEN 

AS a rule the more intellectual men are fond 
of the society of women. Women are ap- 
preciative, consequently they are more stimulative 
than men. But besides their appreciativeness they 
have another force in them that is a tonic to men. 
The strong wine of sex-attraction, when thinned 
somewhat by the distances of social usage, and 
strained through the bars of convention, is one of 
the rarest moral and mental tonics to masculine 
minds. 

The most useful friends of the artist, the poet 
and the public speaker are feminine. For woman 
is never impersonal; she always sees the man be- 
hind his work, and that is the kind of critic a man 
needs. But that does not explain her power, 
which is altogether mysterious. She is different. 
She has the transfiguring radio-active dynamic. 
She has the Ithuriel wand. She has the gift of 
rainbows. The prohibitionists ought to expel her 
from their party, for she is the original intoxicant. 
She is dangerous, as religion and play and all good 

41 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

things are dangerous. (The only things that are 
always perfectly harmless are the things that are 
useless.) And then women are not stewed, 
soaked, stuffed and saturated with money-making, 
which renders the average man a bore. 

Wrote Thackeray to his nephew : " I pray sin- 
cerely that you may always have a woman for a 
friend. Make yourself a lady's man as much as 
ever you can." 



42 



YOUTH ETERNAL 

THE earth was just as lively In spring when 
Chaucer sung of April and his showers 
sweet, the leaves were just as young and tender and 
the dewy freshness lay just as heavenly on the 
primrose when Wordsworth rose early and walked 
by the lake, and birds In Caesar's day built their 
nests In hopes as greening and sang their surprise 
of day In joy as wild and new as now. 

To-day I see young people exuberant around 
me and the sun boiling up in dawns of promise, 
and seeds sprouting, and myriads of things com- 
mencing; and I reflect how old the earth is, and 
think of castles I have seen crumbling, and of 
gnawed, gray monuments, and of empty tombs; 
and I marvel at the abiding youngness of the 
world and of humanity. The boys and girls of 
Chicago are as much interested In themselves as 
the boys and girls of Athens In Pericles' day were 
Interested In themselves. 

Why does not the world wear out and grow 
tired and old? Whence comes this exhaustless 

43 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

liquor of youth that runs through the veins of men 
and trees? Go and tell this miracle to Sirius and 
to Arcturus, that here rolls a strange planet which 
buries its men and its forests, making history of 
one and coal of the other, and still keeps eternally 
young I 



44 



LOVE MILITANT 

IF love be the greatest thing in the world then 
the first of all moral obligations is to be lov- 
able. And as a matter of fact lovableness is our 
most militant quality. Uprightness, purity, truth, 
temperance and wisdom are all good, but are 
defensive, self-preserving virtues; lovableness is 
aggressive and conquering. The former build 
the walls and strengthen the foundations of our 
religion; the latter sallies forth and brings in cap- 
tives. Toward faith and righteousness and all 
other ingredients of our creed there are infidels, 
but toward amiability there is no infidel. Lova- 
bleness is the one grace that must be genuine; we 
can pretend honesty and piety, but lovableness is 
the very flavor of our personality; it lies beneath 
the will, it is the quality of our subconscious self. 
It does not depend upon a handsome face nor any 
such thing ; it is to move through the world a cen- 
ter of cheer and hope, a point of joy and rest. 
How can one obtain this charm if it is not to be 
got by the will? By coming under the influence 

45 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

of some lovable soul we are changed as Iron is 
magnetized by Iron. So that, at bottom, the 
whole problem of the propagation of real Chris- 
tianity is the problem of the spread of personal in- 
fluence. The Kingdom of Heaven is " like 
leaven, which a woman took and hid in three meas- 
ures of meal, till the whole was leavened." 



46 



GROWTH OF IDEALS 

OUR ideals ought to grow along with the 
rest of our nature. It is as bad not to allow 
our convictions to develop as it is to have no con- 
victions. Nothing is so dangerous as an out- 
grown conviction. There can be no beauty in a 
life that is loyal to something it suspects may be 
untrue. 

The reactionaries are more dangerous than the 
sinners. For sinners only encumber progress: 
reactionaries oppose it. Revolutions are due to 
conservatives. Humanity can carry along its 
rebels and weaklings; it has to kill off the stand- 
patters. 

We have then a double duty : to be loyal to our 
ideal, and to be ready to follow it when it advances 
into something better, as it ought to do by the un- 
folding of our knowledge, the deepening of our 
love, the widening of our outlook — in fine, the 
normal growth of our heart and mind. 

There is no short and easy road to a noble and 
intelligent goodness. There is no simple set of 

47 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

rules to be learned once for all; there is no " do- 
this-and-live " pill. To be good calls for the 
greatest effort, daily recurring, for perpetual read- 
justment, for the cooperation of all our wisdom, 
experience and feeling. For to be good simply 
means to live our lives to the full. The greatest 
Master of morals said that if anyone would 
follow Him he must take up his cross daily. 



48 



WATER 

THERE Is a time and place for everything, 
and sin consists In doing a thing at the 
wrong place or time. Thus It Is quite as sinful to 
sing a gospel hymn or use the name of Deity at a 
ball game as It Is to laugh and yell In church. 

I love Bohemlanism, Free Thought and Uncon- 
ventlonallty, but I loathe these things when they 
are taken to mean uncleanness, slovenliness and 
Irresponsibility. 

The Creator had a great moral purpose In mak- 
ing the surface of the globe three-fourths water. 
The object was to have plenty wherewith to wash 
the other fourth. 

In the world of Ideas also three-fourths are 
water. That Is, there are great cleansing, pur- 
ging, disinfecting thoughts and feelings. Our 
moral and Intellectual health depends upon the 
frequency with which we bathe In these. They 
are work, greatest of all spiritual detergents; and 
play, almost as great; besides some others. 

It Is because all children play and most grown 

49 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

people work for a living that the race remains 
healthy-minded and true-hearted. 

Mental and moral diseases come from the 
tramps (the idle poor) and .the smart set (the 
idle rich) and the reHgious fanatics (the morally 
playless) and from the sporting people (the 
morally workless). 



50 



> 



SOLITUDE 

WITHOUT bitterness or sourness or 
egoism we ought to recognize that the 
nearer we come to wisdom the more we become 
isolated. The closer we approach truth and per- 
fect goodness the narrower and lonelier the way. 
It is easy for this reflection to trail off into a sickly 
sentiment, but there is a truth in it that is not at 
all mawkish, but virile and full of contentment. 

The point of religious ecstasy in any faith Is 
always found as a personal and secret revelation. 
Whether I reach this at mass or at the mourners' 
bench, among the hallelujahs of the crowd or in 
a narrow cell, still it is all mine. The soul must 
be alone to find God. 

So of wisdom: when we say experience is the 
best teacher we mean that there is no real knowl- 
edge except that which one finds alone. No truth 
thrills us with its discovery unless truth and we 
meet without bystanders, in solemn tryst of two. 

No living man ever had enough self-respect. 
Egotism is different; that is a desire to stand well 

51 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

in others' eyes, while self-respect is — to stand well 
in one's own eyes. 

It is as bad to let other people select your 
opinions, tastes and convictions as it is to allow 
them to. select your wife. To be sure, one should 
be open to reason and be teachable, but the last 
supreme court sits in the center of one's own heart 
and mind. 

With charity to all, without pride, humbly and 
reverently I take my place beside myself as against 
the world. For better or for worse I must love 
whom I love, think what I think, believe what I 
believe. I accept the full accountability. That 
Judge behind the stars may find me sinful, will 
find me weak, but at least He will have to know 
that what faith and love I have toward Him are 
as genuine as my sins. Not In defiance, but in 
respectful, serious acceptance of the charge He 
has put upon me, I repeat the fine lines of Henley : 

" It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishment the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate, 
I am the captain of my soul." 

" Wisdom," says Nietzsche, " is the whisper of 
the soul to itself in the crowded marketplace." 

52 



COURAGE 

THE soul little suspects its own courage. We 
have had to tear men's bodies to pieces, to 
burn, crush, strangle and crucify them to find that 
last wonderful drop of courage. Take even a 
common man, the commonest, and beat and bruise 
him enough and you will see his soul rise God-like. 

When men and devils, law and pitiless nature, 
have closed In upon the soul, and the enemy, 
triumphing, laughs, " At last I have him! He is 
mine I " — it is only then you may witness the 
miracle, Daniel sleeping tn the lion's den, Shadrach, 
Meshach and Abednego walking in the midst of 
the fire, having no hurt, and with them a fourth 
whose form is like the Son of God. These ancient 
tales be parables; the core of truth In them Is the 
wonder of the soul's escape. The only calamity 
Is surrender. 

Nietzsche said: " DIr wird die Last des Lebens 
zu schwer? So musst du die Last delnes Lebens 
vermehren! Wenn der Dulder endlich nach dem 
Flusse Lethe duerstet und.sucht, so musst er zum 

53 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Helden werden, um Ihn geweiss zu finden — Is 
life's burden too heavy for you? Then you must 
increase your burden I When the sufferer at last 
thirsts for the River Lethe and seeks it, he must 
become. a hero if he would be sure to find it." 



54 



/ 



EDITING LIFE 

WE edit ourselves too much. This is one 
of the subtle bad habits of an age of too 
much reading. We contract a literary self-con- 
sciousness. We do not think; we recollect what 
we have seen printed. We have no self-respect, 
but a sort of editorial valuation of how anything 
we propose to do will look on a page. This pub- 
lished or publishable self obscures the real self. 
The beginnings of a genuine emotion trail off into 
the passions of Lady Clara Vere de Vere. A 
personal opinion is scarcely born before it is kid- 
naped by Doctor Johnson. Ideas from type rain 
in upon the mind until it is inundated. We can- 
not even choose our own soap ; for advertisers ding 
the merits of their soap into us from billboards, 
street-car roofs, blotters, electric signs and maga- 
zine leaves until we want their want. 

But one's real self is vastly more interesting 
after all. And the only book worth while is the 
one that sets me to thinking. One glimpse of 
truth flashed up from the recesses of my own being 

55 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

is more vital to me than the Book of Proverbs. 
I must take frequent vacations from reading and 
steep my soul in its owi] wilderness, for my heart 
is wilder than any romance, more untrodden than 
any jungle, more bitter than Gorky, holier than 
Thomas a Kempis. I have never been to its North 
Pole nor scaled its Himalayas. " Few men," says 
Emerson, " find themselves before they die." 



56 



THE DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH 

THE real " Defenders of the Faith " are the 
babies. These are they who furnish the 
fresh supplies of belief, hope, love and all 
the other virile ingredients of our religion. They 
come to the race of men like rain from the infinite 
and water our optimism. All churches, learned 
doctors and divines, organizations, missionaries, 
priests and books float on the tide : the tide itself is 
a deep and hidden power which moves in the in- 
stincts of men; and with every baby that is born 
a new impulse of this tidal dynamic is received. 

The mediaeval world worshiped a woman with a 
child in her arms. What mankind does for a 
thousand years must be profoundly true. What- 
ever our theological notions may be we must con- 
fess that somewhere in this miracle of a child on 
his mother's breast lies the holiest and most re- 
demptive element among all the phenomena of the 
universe. 

We touch the infinite at two points — birth and 
death: so birth and death have always been the 
chief priests of humanity. 

57 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Christmas means divine childhood. The wisest 
men have always regarded the Ideal life as some- 
thing to be returned to, and not something toward 
which we go on. Jesus said: "Except ye turn 
and become as little children ye shall In nowise en- 
ter Into the Kingdom of Heaven." 

When God gives us a child It Is not that we 
may teach him, but that he may teach us. 
The wise mother seeks to develop her child's 
personality; the foolish mother would change it. 
The wise mother plays with her child and lets 
strangers Instruct him ; the foolish mother Instructs 
her child and lets strangers play with him. The 
wise mother Is good for her child's sake; the 
foolish mother wants her child to be good for her 
sake. 



58 



COMMON STOCK 

THE fiction of hereditary greatness dies hard. 
Leonardo da Vinci, the universal genius, 
was born out of wedlock. Goethe's son was a 
weakling. Napoleon's parents were insignificant. 
Abraham Lincoln's parents were poor and illiter- 
ate. Jesus came from a family of laborers by the 
day. There is only one genuinely great strain in 
human blood, the common strain. The Preferred 
Stock of the race is the Common Stock. The 
real rulers of men appear as wild flowers, growing 
in untilled land, blossoming on the highway. The 
plants in the royal hothouses, the Csesars, Roman- 
offs, Hohenzollerns and Wettins, all grow spin- 
dling. The future Garibaldi or Milton is, as prob- 
ably as not, reaching for cookies in your pantry 
at this moment. In greatness there is no heredity. 
We inherit characteristics, but not character. 
The quality we call greatness breaks out in a coal- 
heaver's family as often as in a ducal palace. 
A man was trying to sell some puppies on a 
59 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

street corner. A passerby asked him: " What's 
the breed?" 

" Half Boston bull," was the answer. 

"What's the other half?" 

" Oh, I don't know ! That's just dog, I sup- 
pose." 

The greatness in any man lies in the part of him 
that is " just man." In the ultimate struggle be- 
tween man and man it is not family that counts, 
nor special gifts, nor talents, nor possessions; it is 
the race force, it is the amount of humanity he 
has. 



6q 



LIFE'S REAL OBJECT 

"T IFE," said a philosopher, " is a calculated 

1 V refusal." What we want and get is but 
as a pebble by the shore of that ocean of things 
we wanted and did not get. Why are we put in 
a world where to desire means to suffer? 

We are never going to begin to understand this 
until we settle first of all in our minds the ques- 
tion, To what purpose were we created? If to be 
happy merely, then life certainly is a cynic thing; 
for we miss so much by the way, and at the end 
are tumbled into the grave just as we have learned 
how to be happy. 

But if we adopt the theory that we are put 
here, not to be happy, but to become great, then 
life's refusals become intelligent. 

For if I hold true, all that befalls me, pain and 
pleasure, comedy and tragedy, success and failure, 
feeds my greatness. From the wounds and acids 
of life I gather prudence, patience, self-control, 
will power, equanimity and courage. 

" All things work together for good " to those 
6i 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

who have learned that there is something more 
worth while than happiness. " The stars in their 
courses fight against " all who think nature's last 
word is pleasure. 

There is a strain of baseness in every philosoph- 
ical system called hedonistic, that is, making 
pleasure one's chief aim; whether it be the low 
hedonism of Aristlppus (bodily pleasure) or the 
higher hedonism of Epicurus (spiritual pleas- 
ure). Our faith is in a nobler Teacher whose 
sign is The Cross. 



62 



OLD AGE AND FAITH 

I CAN conceive of no more repellent thing than 
growing old. And there Is no need of it. 

There is a remedy against old age. It is — 
Faith. The old doctrine of " Justification by 
Faith " needs to be brought out, dusted, reshaped 
and put into use. Nothing can " save " one, even 
in the most modern sense, nothing can make and 
keep one well and strong and glad, except faith. 

The only thing worth while is youth. The 
true elixir of everlasting youth Is faith. " It is 
faith In something," wrote Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, " enthusiasm for something, that makes 
life worth living." 

The old " believe and be saved " doctrine takes 
on a new and amazing significance In the light of 
the newest psychology. " Believe and be young," 
we might now say. 

For whoever believes In himself. In his fellow- 
men and In the Eternal Cosmic Goodness, is 
young even If sixty and bald; and whoever dis- 
trusts himself, doubts his neighbors, and regards 

63 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

the universe as a poker game or a steam engine is 
old even at twenty-one. 

Deep in my own counsels I have the Key to 
things. I can make of this world a prison or a 
playground. The Key is my Will. I will be- 
lieve, I will trust, I will defy despair unto the last ; 
then under white hair my soul shall bloom as a red 
crocus in the snow; within my collapsing body my 
heart shall sing as a caged bird about to be free. 



54 



SAINT VANITAS 

A WORD of praise ought to be said for that 
most useful of human frailties — vanity. 
It is the maid-of-all-work that docs most of the 
drudgery of souls, for which little-used moral 
qualities get the credit. For the bulk of our re- 
spectabilities and proprieties are due to sheer 
pride, and vanity Is the best substitute for honesty, 
truthfulness and dignity of character. As In the 
case of silverware the plated article often Is harder 
and wears better than the sterling. The kindly 
Creator usually endows defective persons with an 
^ver-supply of conceit as a merciful compensation. 
Most under-sized and physically deformed people 
arc vain and touchy. Saint Vanltas is the patron 
saint of aU who stand for a living upon raised 
places In public, including those who operate on 
the stage, the pulpit, the platform and the stump. 
Vanity is a great conserving power in society; for 
It has often been the only thing that has kept the 
boy from getting drunk, the girl from going 
wrong, the man from ruining his business and the 

65 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

woman from wrecking her home. Blessed, thrice 
blessed be pride which descends from heaven to 
perk up the boy with warts on his hands, the girl 
with nothing but a pretty face, and the fool busi- 
ness man slaving like a beast long after he has 
more than he needs! Even the doddering old 
man is not exempt from its unction, and as he 
talks vanity anoints him like " the ointment that 
ran down upon Aaron's beard even to the hem of 
his garment." We join with Thackeray In ex- 
claiming, " Let us thank God for imparting to us, 
poor, weak mortals, the inestimable blessing of 
vanity I " 



(>e 



THE IMPOSSIBLE 

ONE of the axioms that arc not true Is " No 
one can perform the impossible." We 
can tell just what strain an iron bar can stand, and 
we can gauge precisely the force of steam; but 
when wc come to the human being we find a para- 
dox — a creature that does the impossible. 

A tender woman, if she be gripped by some 
strong emotion, fright or eagerness to save her 
child, may suddenly become strong as a giant. 
When Stephenson proposed to run a steam car at 
forty miles an hour the world proved it could not 
be done; no one could live going so fast through 
the air. Yet he did the " impossible " I Fifty 
years ago it was impossible for a man to talk in 
Chicago and have his ordinary voice heard in 
New York: that is now done every day. 

No man gets the ability to do an impossibility 
before he does it; the power comes with the effort. 
It is because of this law that moral obligations are 
binding. 

The Bible is full of commands, the doing of 

67 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

which is beyond us. Who can keep the Ten 
Commandments or the precepts of Jesus? Only 
those can perform these duties who perform them. 
Power settles on us as we try. 

Jesus told the palsied man to stretch out his 
arm. He could not; but he did; power entered as 
he acted. The multitude was fed on a few loaves 
and fishes; enough provision was not made be- 
forehand, but the supply was increased as it was 
given. 

" Responsibility," said Horace Bushnell, " is not 
measured by ability." The half of strength is 
faith. 



68 



PLUNGING INTO HAPPINESS 

EVERY good inheritance has Its mixture of 
evil. Every virtue we draw from our potent 
ancestry carries with It a drop or two of their vices. 
I suppose there is no set of forefathers more to 
be proud of than the Puritans. They had a tre- 
mendous moral dynamic. But they had one 
peculiar taint. They were afraid of happiness. 
You recall Macaulay's gibe, that the Puritans 
objected to bear-baiting not so much because It 
gave pain to the bears as because it gave pleasure 
to the spectators. 

And possibly It Is well to suspect happiness, 
which is often a mark of thoughtlessness and 
sometimes a mask of cruelty or cowardice. And I 
by no means hold happiness to be the last word 
In souls. But for all that we ought to discrimi- 
nate; for joy is set in the nature of things, and we 
ought at least to think it innocent until it be proven 
guilty. 

I know people who dare not let themselves go in 
times of joy; they are fearful something evil will 

69 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

happen. Because life is alternately light and 
shade they are suspicious of light. A run of luck 
seems to them a warning. When love comes they 
dare not trust, for fear of disillusion. When they 
say they are well and content they knock on wood. 
The great loveliness and sunshine of children 
come from their unreserved plunge into happi- 
ness, when they find it. God bless theml and 
every childlike soul I as Dante writes: 

** L'anima semplicetta, che sa nulla, 
Salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore, 
Volontier torna a cio che la trastulla: 

— the dear, simple soul, who knows nothing save 
that, sprung from a joyous Maker, she turns gladly 
to that which gives delight." 



70 



THE PHILISTINES 

THE name changes, the thing is always with 
us. There is a word of the street that fas- 
cinates me. It is " dub." It is a delicious con- 
fection, a naive and apt description of a type of 
person that diuturnally infests the race. The 
French call him an epicier (grocer), which carries 
with it a peculiar Gallic slur. The Germans use 
the epithet Philister. Arnold adopts this word 
and defines philistines as " humdrum people, slaves 
to routine, enemies to light; stupid and oppressive, 
but at the same time very strong." And, oh, 
how strong they are I The females are arbiters 
of society, the dull torment of children, extinguish- 
ers by asphyxiation of the home. The males, 
like soggy lumps of human dough, hold down 
great wealth, clog pulpits, spread over into books, 
obstipate the teaching profession, enfarce all presi- 
dencies and chairmanships, and altogether render 
this sublunary globe a sheet of sticky fly-paper 
wherein agile and adventurous souls are caught, 
wriggle and die. The one god they know and 

71 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

worship is Success. It is they who dig the graves 
for genius; it is they who afterward erect the 
monument. Young man, if you would get on, buy 
a house and lot in Boetia and learn to love in- 
sulsity. 



72 



SOMETHING ELSE 

WHAT is man's greatest good? A question 
which has been variously answered by the 
philosophies and by the religions of all time. The 
Buddhist, for instance, holds before us the root- 
ing out of all desire, and likewise the Greek 
Stoics considered all emotions diseases of the soul 
and recommended utter equanimity; the hedonists 
of all sorts, on the contrary, from Epicurus to the 
latest religious faddist, set forth pleasure of one 
kind or another as our chief aim. So practically 
those you meet will answer in different ways ; one 
will say " The chief end of man is to glorify God," 
as found in the catechism; another will confess 
his object is to get money; another, to be com- 
fortable ; another, to have a good time ; another, to 
do one's duty, and so on. Out of all this swirl of 
opinion there is creeping up into the modern mind 
the feeling that the truest good of any man may 
be found in the phrase, not lightly but seriously 
taken, " to live your own life." 

Neither happiness nor the trampling under foot 
73 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

of happiness can satisfy. Tannhauser could not 
bear his lot in the lap of Venus : he hungered for 
human strife and tears. And no man could stand 
perfect bliss. Neither could a man endure unre- 
lieved sorrow. The fact Is, the human soul Is om- 
nivorous and must needs feed on sweet and bitter 
herbs, and must eat its moral flesh, fish and salt. 

Our life is incomplete without both joy and sor- 
row. The chief want of life is something else. 
So the most normal life is composed of a little 
pain and a little pleasure, some content and some 
remorse, love and hate, triumph and despair, 
waking and sleeping, business and rest, certainty 
and mystery, passion and Indifference; in short the 
greatest good is to be found In taking things as 
they come, with a healthy digestion that trans- 
forms experience into character. 

There is sound sense in the exclamation, " It'^ 
all in a lifetime I " The Christian says, " All 
things work together for good." And the self- 
same thought is naively turned by Robert Louis 
Stevenson : 

" The world is so full of a number of things, 
I am sure we should all be as happy as kings." 



74 



WHO PAID TOLSTOY? 

THERE Is a vast deal being said by the 
alleged friends of humanity to-day about 
justice. Labor champions declare they seek not 
charity nor sympathy, but simply a square deal. 
" We will get justice," one of them recently ex- 
claimed, " but by our own efforts. The campaign 
shall be waged in the press, on the platform, at the 
polling booth; if need be, on the stricken field I 
We will win our rights and by our own efforts se- 
cure a just world as between man and man." 

A right manly, brave-sounding declaration! 
But it is only half true. Justice Is a fine word, 
but it is not the last word between man and man. 
To so order the world that every man receive his 
due wage would not bring the millennium. For 
we are not born equal; wc may be " equal before 
the law," but we are unequal before nature and the 
world's work. Justice would have nothing to 
say why the strong should not take from the weak, 
nor why the wise should help the simple. 

Another, and a wholly mysterious word, shines 

75 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

above justice as the sun above the moon. It is 
love. Above all earth's equities looms this super- 
equity. Above all work done for fair pay towers 
the work done for no pay at all — just for love. 

Who pays the mother for her long night-vigils, 
and the father for his toil for his offspring, and the 
wife for her sacrifices, and the soldier for his 
wounds, and the hero for giving up his life to 
rescue another? Who paid Jesus for His agony, 
and Regulus for his patriotism, and Walt Whit- 
man for his poetry, and William Morris and Wil- 
liam Booth for their labors toward social better- 
ment? 

It is not a just distribution of goods the human 
race needs so much as it needs a loving esteem of 
one another. 

For who paid this old man, striving In the heart 
of a merciless monarchy for the uplift of his 
brother men, excommunicated and anathematized 
by the official representatives of that Christ who 
was his passion, staggering forth at last to die 
alone, crazed by the burden of the world's sorrow? 

Who paid Tolstoy? 



76 



THE CHURCH 

I WONDER if I will be tolerated if I say what 
church I want to join? I belong to a church 
now and expect to remain in it. That is because 
the one I want to join is not — yet. 

My ideal church is called The Church of the 
Greatest Common Divisor. If you take the his- 
toric Christian churches and examine them you will 
find there is a certain part of their creed and feel- 
ing and practice common to all. That is the essen- 
tial, livable part of each. What each sect has 
peculiar to itself does not appeal to me. I cling 
to my own church not for that which distinguishes 
it from the others, but for the sake of that which 
it shares with them. 

Inside of this Greatest Common Divisor grow 
all the sweet flowers of the religious feeling. Out- 
side are its baptized animosities. Ask priest or 
preacher, Pope or Salvation Army lassie. Christian 
Scientist or Presbyterian, if it is better to do right 
than wrong, better to pray than to be godless, bet- 
ter to be pure, true, loving, honest and humble 

77 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

than to be unclean, false, hateful, crooked and 
proud; and from all you will get a " Yes " and an 
" Amen." 

I am not opposed to the sects. I am for them. 
There is something in each that I want. I do not 
say all are equally right, but I say that the Great- 
est Common Divisor of all is right. 



78 



KNOWLEDGE 

IT is not the victory but the fight that is worth 
while. It is to be doubted whether education- 
made-easy is of much use. Knowledge is of no 
intrinsic value; its value lies wholly in the exer- 
cise it takes to acquire it. A meal you walk to is 
worth twice as much as a meal that is brought you. 
Shakespeare never saw an English grammar; they 
quarry grammars out of Shakespeare. Maupas- 
sant never took lessons in short-story writing. Na- 
poleon and Cromwell, two of the wisest governors, 
passed through no college course in the science of 
government. Universities and libraries have their 
dangers ; they are careless mothers and smother as 
many babes as they rear. Savages have neither 
indigestion nor knowledge of hygiene, because they 
have to run for every bite. People began to have 
bad teeth with the invention of mush. Knowl- 
edge we may gather from study; wisdom comes 
only from experience. Philosophy we may learn 
from books; common sense (which is usable 
philosophy) we learn from folks. This was the 

79 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

wisdom of Lincoln; every item of it he had 
grubbed out as he grubbed out scrub-oak stumps. 
Such wisdom is disconcerting, irritating to much- 
read men, because it is so bluntly self-evident and 
plain. " In Lincoln," said Dana, " we get an idea 
how superior is that intellectual faculty which sees 
the vitality of a question and knows how to state 
It." 



80 



OUR KIND OF FOLKS 

't^^UR kind of folks,"— God bless them! 

V^ We shoulder our way through a crowded 
world. Most we meet are indifferent. They 
would perhaps lift an eyebrow if we should die. 
Some are hostile, actively or passively. But the 
hundredth man is glad because of us. When 
he remembers we exist, his eye kindles, his heart 
makes music. I met a man the other day on the 
train. He got on at Chicago and off at Rock 
Island. He came, like Halley's comet, out of the 
infinite, glowed a little in my sun, and was off 
again on his orbit. I passed three words with a 
woman in Munich on a street car. She, too, has 
disappeared forever. But she had the elective 
look. Who can fathom the strange law of re- 
pulsion and attraction in personalities? It is not 
in blood. Our relations bore us; a stranger in- 
spires us. 

I wonder if heaven will not be a re-grouping of 
people? Is not the criminal simply one who is 
grouped wrong? George Eliot wrote of "the 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

choir invisible"; a fine phrase, but she shaded 
it off into a platitude when she went on to say 
it is composed of the grand and lofty souls. For 
the essence of a choir is harmony. They should 
not all be soloists. I do not want great, vast, 
majestic souls around all the time, but just " our 
kind of folks," who wink at my great weakness 
and praise my little goodness, and laugh at my 
jokes. 



82 



TO THE UNBORN 

HERE'S a draft of thought to the unborn! 
Dim shades, thin mists, they approach 
us from the sky of the future, forever advancing, 
becoming. They arc more truly ourselves than 
we are. They are ourselves distilled, sublimated. 

All our highest labor is for them. For them 
wc arc slowly perfecting cities, smoothing the 
country roads, planting trees, founding and en- 
dowing institutions. It is for ourselves we do 
the menial work of getting food and clothes and 
luxuries ; it is for them all great poetry is written, 
all unselfish heroism performed. Once we were 
of their number; and as thin clouds condense and 
become raindrops so we pattered into existence. 

They are our deepest kin, though they have not 
yet begun. What we are depends upon them. 
In them arc the springs of our highest convictions. 
These non-existent myriads beckon us with what 
persistent pleading, with how beseeching eyes, 
praying us to be great I 

What they shall be depends upon us. It has 
83 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

been said that the Chinese are slaves to their an- 
cestors and Americans are slaves to their posterity. 
And, truly, does any voice from the past equal the 
voice from the unborn? It calls us to truth and 
cleanness and loyalty, so that 

" Sweeter shall the roses blow 

In those far years, those happier years; 
And children weep when we lie low 
Far fewer tears, far softer tears." 



84 



Y 



THE PEACE OF POISE 

THE Greek and the Hebrew fight in every one 
of us. It is the war between the beautiful 
and the good, between the joy of self-expression 
and the joy of self-denial, between the ecstasy 
of indulgence and the ecstasy of renunciation, be- 
tween the love of nature as it is and the love of 
nature as it ought to be, between marvel at the 
wondrous universe as it is and marvel at the still 
more wondrous universe of our ideals. 

On the one hand are youth, the overflowing 
cup of sex-dynamic, art, science, pleasure; on the 
other hand the lure of moral grandeur; here the 
charm of flowers and trees and green meadows, 
there the enchantment of white mountains, cold, 
inaccessible, ever calling. It is the conflict be- 
tween culture and religion. 

The man of sense will hope for peace in the 
triumph of neither contestant. When the reli- 
gious emotions have their full way they land us 
in the barrenness of fanaticism. Oppositely, de- 
stroy the religious sentiment and you mutilate life. 

85 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

We must therefore maintain a balance between the 
two. Then we have peace, not the peace of stag- 
nation, but the peace of poise, all the more true 
and valuable because It can be maintained only by 
vigilance. 



86 



TALK 

A MAN docs not talk to tell what he knows ; 
he talks to find out what he knows. This 
was Socrates's great discovery. A clear mental 
vision of any subject is not obtained by brooding 
over It, but by trying to express it. Doubt and 
confusion are best removed from the mind by 
finding a friend or an adversary and arguing. 
You may not know what you believe when you 
begin, but you will know when you end. 

It Is a mistake to suppose anyone knows, before 
he speaks, what he is going to say. He surprises 
himself quite as much as his hearers. 

Every author is familiar with the paradox that 
the way to find anything to write about is to go 
to work and write about It. 

The one who learns most is the teacher. If 
some way could be devised for pupils In the 
schools to do the teaching they would learn more. 

La Rochefoucauld observed that " there is 
scarcely anyone who does not think more. In con- 
versation, of what he is about to say than of an- 

87 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

swering precisely what is said to him. We can 
see in their eyes and minds a wandering from 
what we say, and an impatience to return to what 
they wish to say." 

The reason of this Is that the pleasure of con- 
versation consists not In what you learn from the 
one with whom you converse, but in what you dis- 
cover about yourself. 



EXPEDIENCY 

THE greatest enemy of truth is expediency. 
The moment a teacher asks what will be 
the effect of his utterance upon his hearers he 
is guilty of a subtle disloyalty to truth. The mo- 
ment a prophet is influenced by any considera- 
tion of whether his message will please or dis- 
please them to whom he is sent he has lost his 
divine unction. 

No man is utterly honest until he believes that 
the truth is always best. Honest preachers have 
no business with results. Parents are so often 
failures because they try to tell their children that 
which it is best for them to know. There is but 
one thing for men to do, and that is, having 
found the truth as nearly as they can, to live and 
to speak it, whether it curses or blesses. For 
truth is God, and whenever we undertake to trim 
it, to veil it, to alter it, so as not to harm some one, 
we have ceased to trust in God; we have become 
infidels, and have substituted our own judgment 
for the wisdom of the universe. 

89 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Whoever teaches a thing he has ceased to be- 
lieve, whoever assists In a propaganda that he Is 
convinced Is wrong, and all because he thinks such 
action Is expedient and " for the best," such an 
one Is fighting against the stars of heaven and has 
leagued himself with those who oppose the cosmic 
energy. 



90 



OUTSIDE THE GATES 

THE praise of happiness is sung best by the 
miserable. How to attain virtue is best 
advised by those who have missed It. One 
who has these excellencies of soul knows little 
about them. Why should he? A man who has 
always had money knows nothing of its value. 
One who Is never ill has no proper appreciation 
of health. Nothing we have can fire the imagina- 
tion: it Is the pang of the want of a thing that 
glorifies It. Criticism of clergymen who do not 
practice what they preach Is unjust. No one can 
preach well what he practices perfectly. He Is 
dull from unbroken goodness. It takes the fall, 
the remorse and shame, the agony and longing 
of imperfection to wring from the heart any elo- 
quence for high and noble living. Not the con- 
tented lover whose affection Is returned, but the 
hopeless lover, passion-wrecked, can paint the love 
that glows and burns. The Christian Scientist 
with a carbuncle reaches a point of passionate pain- 
lessness that the ordinary well person cannot know. 

91 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Do not accuse me, then, of inconsistency if I, who 
am a spendthrift, extol the benefits of economy; if 
I, moody, gloomy and full of irony, depict the 
contentment of a calm, sweet, philosophic mind; if 
I, a failure, tell how to succeed; if I, a sinner, re- 
veal to you the beauty of holiness. Only the soul 
outside the gates can realize the joys of the Holy 
City. 



92 



SMILES 

HAVE you ever noted the difference in smiles? 
Some people smile as though it hurt them; 
when some others smile, it hurts you. There is 
the professional smile of the gentleman who wants 
to sell you a twenty-dollar suit for twelve-fifty, 
and the pious smile that does not at all approve 
of you but wants to rent you a pew, and the 
supercilious smile that knows better but will not 
argue with you, and the malicious smile that is 
glad you got what you deserved, and the smile 
feminine that goes to your head like wine, and the 
smile gastronomic that comes with Roquefort and 
coffee, and the smile minatory that is like a rat- 
tle to warn you the snake is going to strike, and 
the smile complacent that one wears when he 
thinks that he has been particularly clever. Curi- 
ous how many meanings can be conveyed by the 
mere twisting of the mouth-line. 

The best smile is that of an unbeautlful face. 
There is always something affected in the smile 

93 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

of beauty, but the smile of a homely person is a 
triumph of sheer good nature. 

The best recipe for charm, if not beauty, is 
not any kind of facial massage, nor lotion, cream 
or powder, but it is to let a strong, unselfish heart 
shine through whatever kind of front window 
God has given you. 



94 



HERE 

HERE. In this one word Is the quintessence 
and sum total of all the teachings of wisdom 
about life. " Over there, over there," they sing 
In gospel hymn. But it is a wrong remedy based 
on a wrong diagnosis. Location is never what is 
the matter. 

I was made to fit this hole, and this hole was 
shaped to fit me. All the happiness of which I 
am capable I can have here. Right In this coun- 
try, in this city, in this family, at the corner of 
Monroe avenue and Sixty-fourth street, is the 
center of the stellar universe. I have noticed 
from my windows the peculiar fact to which 
Proctor Knott referred in his Duluth speech: 
" The horizon comes down at equal distance in 
all directions." 

Here are greater miracles than in the Old 
Testament, wonders as worth seeing as anything 
along the Grand Tour from Liverpool to Naples, 
joys as pure as in heaven, as high an average of 
saints as in the calendar, plots as thick as on any 
stage, and beauty beyond Millet or Turner. 

95 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Give me not scenes more charming, give me eyes 

To see the beauty that around me lies! 

To read the trail of souls, see angels shy 

Among the faces of the passers-by! 

No golden shore I seek, but a heart that sings 

The exquisite delight of common things. 

The Kingdom of Heaven is not There, but Here. 

Oh, for the seeing eye and hearing ear! 



96 



FAILURES 

DID you ever think of the noble army, of 
failures? Dante was a failure, embittered 
and banished. Socrates was a failure, doomed 
to poison by the city in whose crown of fame he 
is the brightest star. Joan of Arc was a failure, 
her young body burned before the fat eyes of 
comfortable bishops. Michael Angelo called 
himself a failure, only a poor fragment of his 
work done. Savonarola was a failure, and Burns 
and Poe and Tolstoy. And Jesus of Nazareth 
was a failure, deserted by His friends, hounded 
by the populace, crucified between two thieves. 
But It is such failures that make " the choir In- 
visible whose music Is the gladness of the world." 
Only in our weakest, shamefulest moments do we 
care for what men call success. Face to face 
with the revealer. Death, we know that we do not 
In the bottom of our hearts want' what we have 
sought, the foam and glitter. When we come to 
take our final places, over there In the land of 
truth, we want to stand, If we may be found 

97 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

worthy, beside him who drank the hemlock in 
Athens, and him who was murdered in Ford's 
Theater in Washington, and Him who was put 
to death outside the gate of Jerusalem. There 
we shall hardly care to know the last lord of priv- 
ilege. " Better," says Browning, 

" Better have failed in the high aim, as I, 
Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed 
As, God be thanked, I do not ! " 



98 



SILENCE 

THE most eloquent, beautiful and perfect 
thing in the world Is silence. The very top 
of passion Is speechless. When the skilled actor 
wishes to portray emotions that transcend the 
ordinary he is still, motionless, expressionless. 
The most tremendous tragedy of human life Is 
the most silent — death. You are most unan- 
swerable to your opponent when you say nothing. 
Whatever you say he will retort to in some way; 
when you say nothing he cannot understand. 
Alertness and practical skill we can get from 
business, from the give-and-take of the hurly- 
burly of affairs. But long and deep thoughts 
come only from stillness. It is in the heart of soli- 
tude alone that we hear the whispers of the in- 
finite and feel those vast, sweet, unutterable cur- 
rents of truth and of peace that thrill the hidden 
center of the universe. 

There is also a social silence, where two have 
learned the art of being together and saying 
nothing. You can manage to get along with 

99 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

anybody by click-clack and mutually passing the 
bromldlons, but It Is a rare personality that you 
can enjoy, and feel that he enjoys you, just by 
the flowing magnetism of being near. The air 
of this old world Is full of streams of silent sym- 
pathy, wireless joy, from heart to absent heart. 
" This world Is so waste and empty," says Goethe 
in " Wllhelm Melster," " when we figure but 
towns and hills and rivers in it, but to know that 
someone Is living on with us, even In silence, this 
makes our earthly ball a peopled garden." 



100 



THINGS AS THEY ARE 

I LIKE things for themselves and not for 
reasons. I love words not only for what 
they mean, but also for what they are. Each 
word has an estimable flavor of its own, and to 
arrange them is as pleasant as mixing a salad. 
I love a baby not for what it is to become, but 
for what it is. I love an old man not for his 
record, but for his old age. I love music not 
for what it expresses, but for its own sweet sound. 
I love woman not for high nor for low reasons, 
but just for her femininity. I move among the 
deep instincts, and the more I learn to appreciate 
the primal desires the happier I am, for Nature 
is wiser than any explanation of her. I love re- 
ligion, quite apart from its supposed production 
of morality, and In spite of Its disagreeable re- 
spectability, and simply because it pleases mc more 
than music of Debussy or painting of Dabo, 
though somewhat after the same manner. The 
universe opens its heart to me because I do not 
want to change it. What anything is is far more 

lOI 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

wonderful than what It might be. I love my pen, 
my paper-knife, my rug, my trees, my sky, my 
wife, my friends and my God. I utterly put 
away the vile wish to alter anything. And I want 
to go to Kipling's Heaven, where 

" Each, in his separate star, 

Shall draw the Thing as he sees It 
For the God of Things as They are." 



I02 



THE INVISIBLE 

YOUTH has vision. It is young eyes that 
see the invisible. When we were children 
we saw ghosts, and Santa Claus, and angels, and 
giants. They were real. We played with them. 
Old people wondered why we laughed and 
capered and shouted. When we told them they 
shook their heads and smiled indulgently. Hav- 
ing eyes they saw not, and having ears they heard 
not, what we saw and heard. God had put into 
our young eyes and ears some subtle alembic that 
transformed the beggarly elements of the com- 
monplace Into the glory and trappings of knights 
and kings and courts. 

It is youthful races that see. It was because 
Moses had eyes fresh and young that he saw the 
bush burning. It was because the children of 
Israel were really childlike that they beheld the 
pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. 
Bushes yet are aflame with God, and miraculous 
pillars of smoke and fire still move before us, 

103 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

If we but had faculties young enough to perceive 
them. 

The early Greeks filled the forests with fauns 
and satyrs, trees had their pale dryads, and from 
the sea arose nymphs, half foam, half fancy, to 
beguile them. The moon now is a huge cold 
clinker whirling about for no particular reason: 
then it was Diana, the chaste, hunting all night 
among the fields of stars. The sun nowadays is 
a big blazing torch, a chemical thing: then it was 
Apollo, god of light, ushered in by Aurora, at- 
tended by the pink-toed Hours. 

We sympathize with Schiller, who laments the 
passing of the gods of Greece; and with Mrs. 
Browning in her plaint for the death of Pan, he 
who sung his whispered song on all the marges, 
playing upon the bowing reeds; and we can al- 
most join with Wordsworth in his cry, 

"Great God! I'd rather be 
A pagan, suckled on a creed outworn, 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn, 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn ! " 



104 



FULLNESS 

THE only real problem of life is to keep it 
full. Emptiness is the one unhappiness, the 
one sin. Tornadoes are caused by aerial vacu- 
ums; vices arc caused by spiritual vacuums; every 
crime is a " brain storm." Drunkards and glut- 
tons try to fill the soul by injecting liquids and 
solids into the stomach. The criminal class is 
the idle class. 

To make a man happy fill his hands with work, 
his heart with affection, his mind with purpose, 
his memory with useful knowledge, his future with 
hopes and his stomach with food. The devil 
never enters a man except one of these rooms be 
vacant. Cast him out, and sweep and garnish 
the room, and he will return with seven other 
devils. The only way to be rid of him is to 
fill the room and take down your " To Let " sign. 

We abound in misdirected energy. It is hard 
to get all the air out of a tumbler by the air- 
pump and your vacuum is never perfect; but it 

105 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

is quite easy to do it by filling the tumbler with 
mercury. How then shall the soul be filled? 

" A man consumes his life," says J. Brierly, 
" in gaining wealth, and finds at the end that he 
has lost the power of enjoying it." Spinoza, 
who refused a fortune that he might fill himself 
a better way, wrote: " To love only the perish- 
able means strife, envy and fear; while to love 
the eternal feeds the mind with pure joy, and is 
wholly free from sorrow." 

Only the Infinite can fill the Infinite soul of 
man. Then truly, as a modern philosopher 
says, " we have a degree of existence at least ten 
times larger than others; in other words, we exist 
ten times as much." 



io6 



AURICLE AND VENTRICLE 

THE word heart Is used in two senses; one 
literal, the other figurative: one the mus- 
cular center of blood circulation, the other the 
spiritual center of the affections. 

Let us push the analogy, and we shall come 
upon a curious and striking distinction. As the 
heart of flesh has an auricle, by which It receives 
blood, and a ventricle, by which it sends forth 
blood, even so the spiritual nature has two kinds 
of love — that produced by receiving and that 
produced by giving. 

For instance, we love apple pie and sleep and 
flattery and music and all things that pleasantly 
titillate the senses. This is auricular love, the 
kind that comes into us. On the other hand, 
we love also self-sacrifice, making others happy, 
defending the helpless, dying for our country and 
all those deeds wherein the soul finds joy in giving 
out its force — ventricular love, we may say. 

And as the blood entering the heart Is dark 
and impure, and the blood issuing from the heart 

107 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

is red and bright and pure, so a man's contami- 
nation arises chiefly from the Inflowing pleasures; 
he Is In danger of becoming a glutton, a drunkard 
or some other kind of toxic pleasure-seeker. The 
upbuilding passions are they that go out from us, 
as patriotism, friendship, kindness and worship. 

Yet is arterial made from venous blood. So 
also in proportion as we enjoy the pleasures of 
receiving, we transmute their force, if we have 
good lungs. Into the finer and more life-giving 
emotions. The normal life means a full auricle 
and a full ventricle. " It Is more blessed to give 
than to receive " carries an Implication we some- 
times forget — to-wit, that It Is blessed to re- 
ceive. 



io8 



REWARDS 

THERE is reward for evil, for good there 
is no reward. It is precisely because 
there is no possible way to pay for a noble action 
that it is noble. The moment you pay for it, it 
becomes base. The curse of the Pharisees is that 
" they have their reward." 

Love is vile, unless it is freely given, without 
money and without price. Reason likewise adul- 
terates and destroys the noble element of virtue. 
A man who knows why he is honest is not honest. 
A woman who understands the grounds of her 
virtue is not virtuous. The soul never puts forth 
its sweetest, holiest flower except as a shoot from 
the subconscious instincts. That is why we adore 
little children and are shy of professional saints. 

Let us not then complain of fate. If all our 
goodness had been appreciated, if we were healthy, 
rich and famous, we should lose that feeling of 
inner triumph. Let us not wail that we cannot 
understand the doings of destiny. To under- 
stand is vanity and vexation of spirit. To be- 

109 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

lleve, when It is dark, is pure joy. "The peace 
of God," we are told, " passeth all understand- 
ing." In other words, let our good deeds be done 
without hope or fear, or, as R. L. Stevenson says, 
"let us live without fear or favor," for we 
approach perfection only as virtue comes to have 
a good taste, and we do right for no other reason 
in the world than that we like it. 



no 



ART AND DEMOCRACY 

IF I were king I would make a decree that all 
art should be for the whole people, and that 
the one thing wealth could not do should be to 
control, monopolize or In any way own the time, 
talents or products of creative genius. Rich men 
would be granted the privilege of contributing 
to a general public fund for the purchase of beau- 
tiful public things, but they should not be al- 
lowed to sit In any councils or boards of direc- 
tion to manage such matters. I should utterly 
democratize art, as it Is done in the Wagner 
Theater In Munich, where all seats are the same 
price. I should allow no private boxes or other 
opportunity for vanity and snobbery In any play- 
house. I should take the theater entirely out of 
private hands and address myself to the question 
of public amusement as seriously and as demo- 
cratically as government now attends to the mat- 
ter of public schools. I would thus utterly free 
the artist, whether actor, musician, sculptor, 

III 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

painter or writer, and give him but one master, 
the people. I believe the influence of all aristoc- 
racies, of birth or of money has been prejudicial 
to the best work. 



112 



INTROSPECTION 

CARE Is a late and artificial product of the 
human animal. It means introspection. 
The child's eyes see outward; he never looks 
Into himself nor analyzes his state of being. We 
grow wretcheder as we grow older for the reason 
that we fall more and more into the way of taking 
Inventories of our physical, mental and moral In- 
sides. The healthiest persons are not those who 
are always taking care of themselves and what 
they eat, but those who do not think of such 
things at all. And the best people are not the 
saints who are ever probing and examining their 
motives, but those who are oblivious to motives. 
We are curious beings. The one thing that 
spoils us Is self-consciousness. Concentrate your 
mind on your hand or foot or stomach or eye and 
you will work up a pain In the spot where your 
attention Is focused. So great and powerful Is 
the fact that the best way to cure an ache Is to 
forget it that this truth has been elevated Into a 
religion. 

113 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

And it is as bad for a saint to dwell upon 
his sanctity as it is for a criminal to dwell upon 
his perversity. The minute you are conscious of 
nobleness and goodness and holiness you begin 
to lose them. Somebody asked Mr. Moody how 
it stood with his soul. " I haven't any idea," he 
answered. " I have been so busy saving other 
people's souls I haven't had time to think about 
it." That, I venture to say, was his holiest mo- 
ment. 

The remedy for thinking of your bad qualities 
is not to think of your good ones, but to cease 
thinking of yourself at all. There will be no 
temples in heaven, as St. John says, because there 
will be no conscious religion or morality there. 
Where people are perfectly good and happy and 
pure it never occurs to them to talk about it. 
The divine flavor of any perfect virtue is uncon- 
sciousness. 



114 



?^ 



IMAGINATION 

A GOOD deal of everyday misery is due to a 
lack of imagination, for this faculty is the 
prime essential to being good, polite, kind or 
agreeable. Any dumb dog can be bad. The 
New Testament commandments are a pronounced 
appeal to imaginative power. The Golden Rule 
requires that you " put yourself In his place," 
which you cannot do unless you can make the 
other fellow's self seem real to you. The Beati- 
tudes call for a projected, outside-of-yourself 
point of view, and the Parables are addressed to 
the fancy. 

We lack that " civic conscience," of which we 
hear so much, because we lack the ability to imag- 
ine ourself as a public thing. We are unkind 
to children, cruel to prisoners and neglectful of 
the suffering, simply because we are stupid. 

One of the characters in Richter's " Flower, 
Fruit and Thorn Pieces " says : " Every morn- 
ing, every evening, I think, how much ought I 
not to forgive her, for we shall remain so short a 
time together! " 

115 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

If we could project ourselves into " the mo- 
ment after," how many follies we should not com- 
mit 1 If we had enough imagination, we should 
do our repenting before instead of after the deed. 

Thomas Hood's lines express the crime of 
riches, which is dullness. His dying rich man 
cries : 

" The wounds I might have healed, 
The human sorrow and smart! 
And yet it never was in my soul 

To play so ill a part: 
But evil is wrought by want of thought 
As well as by want of heart." 



Il6 



CATCHING STEP 

^'TJENTREZ dans I'ordrcl" cried Amid. 

XA. Catch step with nature! We are feeble 
creatures in a world of great forces. We can do 
nothing, strictly speaking, of ourselves. All we 
can do Is to get these forces to act for us. I 
cannot pull a million pounds of freight, but by 
properly managing the expansive force of steam 
I can make this giant power perform the task. 
With a bucketful of gasoline I can move along 
at sixty miles an hour. By hoisting canvas I can 
pull a thousand-ton ship ; that is, by adjusting 
myself to the wind I can do what is impossible 
to my unaided strength. 

Also among men there are vast currents, and 
winds, and steam-forces of passion, and Inertia, 
tides and gravitation. To gain my good pur- 
pose with men, therefore, I must set my sails, turn 
my rudder and, in short, accommodate myself to 
these tremendous dynamics. The great doers, 
such as Napoleon and Cecil Rhodes and Bis- 
marck, were not individually stronger than other 

117 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

men, but they had a certain knack and shrewdness 
in going with the wind. 

To get happiness I need the same sort of cun- 
ning. To try to have my way with the world is 
to struggle with my bare hands against cosmic 
currents. When I study oak trees and stars, the 
migration of birds and the coming of the sea- 
sons, I discover that my only hope of happiness 
is in habituating myself to want what nature gives, 
and to want It when she gives it. 

There Is something immoral In those " special 
answers to prayer " which consist In supposedly 
altering the Supreme Will to agree with our little 
wills. For the real problem In religion Is to get 
ourselves into harmony with the wise and perfect 
Will that governs all things, and not to bend that 
Will to ours. 

Thus Spinoza : " Non studemus ut natura 
nobis, sed contra ut nos naturae paremus. — Our 
desire Is not that nature may obey us, but, on the 
contrary, that we may obey nature." 



ii8 



ETHICS OF THE INTELLECT 

WITH all our pratings of morality, few 
of us realize the ethics of the intellect. 
Most persons are honest enough in word and 
deed, but are dishonest In their thinking. The 
ultimate courage is to think the truth. Many 
a saint has gone to his last sleep happy in the con- 
sciousness of a life of purity and good works, who 
has never dared be true and fair with his own 
mind. So true is this that mental obliquity has 
even been elevated to an act of salvation, and to 
say that two and two make five has been supposed 
to be especially pleasing to our Maker and Judge. 
Intellectual probity, in fact, is a discovery of 
modern times. Ancient historians are not to be 
trusted, for only recently has history asked. What 
is true? instead of, What is interesting? Man- 
kind owes an unpayable debt to the men of 
science, who Insist on saying that two atoms of 
hydrogen and one of oxygen compose water, 
whether their statement overturns the Republican 

119 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

party, disrupts the church, perverts young people 
and imperils our homes, or not. 

It was a bold and terrible step Into the dark 
when men determined to look only for truth 
and to tell truth alone. Yet it was wise, for that 
Is the real way to show one believes In God. It Is 
still a rare man, however, who can keep his 
loyalty to the truth uncozened by his desires, un- 
tainted by his ambitions and utterly unaffected by 
any fear or hope of consequences. 



I20 



AIR 

WE would get more pleasure from our days 
if we were more discriminating in our ap- 
preciation of the common stuff that makes the 
bulk of them ; and the ordinary is more wonderful 
than the extraordinary. 

For instance, how many of us taste the air? 
We take it, but we do not taste it. And there 
are more different kinds of air than there are of 
champagne, and it is vastly more important to 
know them. There is the thin, clear air of Den- 
ver, and the nervous air of Winnipeg, and the hot, 
oven air of August in Kansas, and the piney air 
of Florida woods, and the salt air of the ocean, 
and the thick, sweet air of summer gardens, and 
the vigorous breath of an October morning, and 
airs flavored with corn or resinous weeds or 
pungent herbs that flow about us as we ride along 
a country road on a warm night; besides, there is 
morning air, noon air and evening air, each differ- 
ing from the others, so that if we were skilled 

121 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

enough we could tell with our eyes shut what 
o'clock it is. 

Then there Is the charged and fearful air pre- 
ceding a storm, and the high, cool air after it; 
and there is air pregnant with rain and air dry 
and hard; in fact, there is hardly a feeling in the 
whole gamut of the human spirit but has a tinge or 
tone In this marvelous, viewless envelope of earth 
to express it. 



122 



ESSENTIALS 

I USED to know a busy woman who would pick 
up a chair, carry it all around the kitchen 
and set it down where she got it. She called that 
work. A vast deal of the activity around us is 
of this grade. Whole lives are spent tramping 
a circle. For instance, the farmer who spends 
his money to get more land, to get more corn, to 
get more hogs, to get more money, to get more 
land, and goes sweating on, till death mercifully 
knocks him in the head. It is bad to be lazy, but 
it is worse to be busy about nothing. The art of 
life is to know the essentials and to be sure to 
attend to them; also to know the nonessentials 
and to be sure to let them alone. Just before you 
quarrel with your wife or break with your friend 
or punish your child, stop and ask yourself if it 
makes any matter. One way to discern essentials 
Is to use your imagination to gain perspective. 
That is, to ask yourself, " In a year from now 
how will it look? " The wisdom of the street, 
with its usual keenness, has put this truth into 

123 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

a homely saying: "What's the difference? In 
a hundred years from now it will be all the same." 
The more you practice seeking the essentials and 
caring for them only, the simpler life will become 
and the more time you will have for play. And 
happiness is largely a question of having time. 
" A gentleman," said Lord Chesterfield, " is 
never in a hurry." There are only a few things 
of vital importance. Let us do them, and then 
sit in the sun. One of the most striking things 
about Jesus is the vast leisure of Him, the in- 
finite number of things He did not attempt. We 
get His point of view when He says, " Martha, 
Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many 
things, but one thing is needful." 



124 



-+ 



HAPPINESS 

THE best thing I have ever seen on the sub- 
ject of happiness is the hint of Carlyle, 
that happiness is a common fraction of which it 
is far easier to increase the value by dividing 
the denominator than by multiplying the numer- 
ator. This is worth explaining. First, happi- 
ness Is not any sort of gettable thing, substance 
or matter; it is a relation, like a trigonometric 
sine or cosine. It is the relative value or propor- 
tion between two things. One of the things is 
"What I Have"; this is the numerator. The 
other is " My Notion of What I Ought to 
Have"; this is the denominator. Now, the peo- 
ple of the world, mostly fools, to use another 
Carlyleism, are working away at the utterly 
asinine task of Increasing the numerator; that Is, 
trying to swell the amount of happiness by mak- 
ing the pile of what they have larger than the 
pile of what they think they ought to have. 
Hence ennui, locomotor ataxia, nervous prostra- 
tion, pessimism and suicide. A few, a blessed, 

125 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

wise few, do not bother with the numerator; they 
work constantly to keep down the size of the de- 
nominator. They know it is vastly easier to re- 
duce your notion of your deserts than it is to in- 
crease your possessions. If any young person be 
teachable enough to receive this, to believe it and 
to practice it, he will be more advantaged than by 
a million dollars. 



126 



v 



ALONE 

THE bitterest word in the language is — 
alone. The first need of the soul is appre- 
ciation. We crave and inwardly cry for smiles as 
a baby wants mother's milk. Down at the 
bottom of the cup the dregs of heaven is to be 
noticed, the dregs of hell is to be forgotten. 
How many hungry spirits haunt the great city! 
They perch like mateless birds, sad-eyed, in the 
third floor back. They walk questing through 
the crowded street. (Oh, the ghostly, craving 
eyes of them!) They sit in gilded chambers of 
luxury, " savage," as Carlyle says, " as a tiger in 
his jungle, only that they devour their own heart 
and not another's." They seek the crowd in 
vain, for they find the crowd but an aggregation 
of solitudes. Scientific men have a theory that 
atoms in a bar of iron or in a stone do not touch 
each other, but revolve as stars at dim atomic 
distances. Likewise between souls ^re interstellar 
spaces. Some one comes near, we clasp hands, 
our lips meet and our friend is whirled away by 

127 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

centrifugal destiny Into remote galaxies. Oh, 
fellow men, there is no greater favor you can 
bestow upon a human being than be Interested In 
him. Any gift you give without giving yourself 
Is salt and ashy. Lowell makes the Master 
say: 

" Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, 
Himself, his hungering neighbor and me." 



128 



IDEALS 

ONCE there was a woman who had Ideals. 
She was what is called a good woman. She 
married a man who had talent. He loved her 
as a Newfoundland dog loves his master, adoring 
her unquestlonlngly, thinking whatever she did 
was right, because she did It, not wishing her 
changed In any way. Her love took the form of 
an Intense desire to lift him up to her Ideals. 
She felt her mission In life was his improvement. 
He idolized her and would have thought it 
sacrilege should anyone have suggested any better- 
ment of her. 

She Idolized him, but she hacked, chiseled, 
sand-papered and polished her Idol constantly, 
while he would have preferred a little plain wor- 
ship. His one desire was to make her happy. 
Her one desire was to make him better. Know- 
ing how he longed for her happiness she was often 
miserable, to Induce him to improve. So she 
burnt her love gladly at the altar of her Ideals and 

129 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

prayed that she might have strength to hold out 
faithful. 

He was not a bad sort. But he was very hu- 
man. Love is given us for rest and peace as 
well as for inspiration, and stimulus. One day 
he died. He left her a little note. When she 
opened it she found two quotations from Robert 
Louis Stevenson: 

" Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come be- 
fore morality: they are the perfect virtues." 
And again: " If your morals are dreary, depend 
upon it they are wrong. I do not say * give them 
up,' for they may be all you have; but conceal 
them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives 
of better and simpler people." 



130 



THE PIANO 

YOU talk about the Impossibility of miracles 
and insist this is a hopelessly commonplace 
world. Did you ever watch a master play the 
piano? I heard Edna Gunnar Peterson the other 
day, and my soul was stirred as though I had seen 
water turned to wine or the dead raised. There 
was something of the wonder of sunsets, the fear 
of mountains, the marvel of red roses and the 
mystery of young love, all shot through with a 
sense of awe at some uncanny, other world power. 
She is a little thing, a blonde wisp of girlhood, 
who might be tasting ice cream sodas and select- 
ing gloves; a mere soft, white child of twenty; and 
she sat for an hour at the piano, with never a 
printed note, and gave a program an ordinary 
person could not learn In two lifetimes, with a 
perfection of technique the same person could not 
attain unto In three re-incarnations. She played 
a concerto of Chopin. Those three words — 
concerto of Chopin — mean the high-water mark 
of the human brain, heart and fingers In piano 

131 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

music. And she played; It was not work. She 
played, as canaries play at singing, as the wind 
plays with leaves, as Raphael must have played 
at painting. To me there Is something awful, 
something that brings tears, some gust of pas- 
sionate wonder. In mastery. I want to weep and 
worship when I approach perfect art. This di- 
vine child, were society founded on any principles 
of justice, would be adopted by the State, and, 
freed forever from wages, should play her life 
long for the confounding of all infidels to beauty. 



132 



SUNLIT SUMMITS 

A MAN may well doubt that he Is doing a 
great deed, or making a great discovery, 
or living a great life, if he does not laugh. 
There is a certain humor, a divine play, an in- 
toxicating joy, that characterize every great work. 
When God made the world, it is written " He 
saw that it was good," and it is not irreverent to 
Imagine these words to imply Him jocund over 
His amazing creation. 

When we read the account of Kepler's dis- 
covery, when he, the first man, " broke into the 
ordinances of Heaven and got a foothold there 
for definite science," it is almost as if we were 
beholding a romping boy. He goes up among 
the stars, as Bushnell tells us, " praying and jok- 
ing and experimenting together. At last, behold ! 
his prophetic formula settles into place I The 
heavens acknowledge it! And he breaks out into 
a holy frenzy, crying : * Nothing holds me ; I in- 
dulge my sacred fury I I triumph over mankind I 
The book is written. It may well wait a century 

^33 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

for a reader, as God has been waiting six thou- 
sand years for an observer 1 ' " 

I find this feeling of play in all genius, in 
Goethe's Faust, in Dante's Inferno, in Ghiberti's 
Bronze Gates, in Lincoln's life. These men 
suffered terribly enough and were in earnest, but 
in their high moments of mastery they seem to 
smile and show a certain lightness of touch. 

Life at its summit is not dark and cold: it is 
sunlit. This is a great and heartening secret. 
Mastery is joy. There was a Man who was 
acquainted with grief more than any other man, 
and on His way toward the Cross, as He neared 
the goal of struggle. He said to His friends: 
*' Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto 
you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you." 



134 



ORGANIZATION 

THE first part of my life I spent In joining 
things; the latter part I am spending in re- 
signing. With the advent of twenty-one years 
came an access of the fever of belonging. I 
joined every secret society that I could find. For 
twenty years I allied myself with organizations 
of all kinds. Then I went to New England. 
There the organizing fury rages unabated. If 
they need rain they call a meeting, form an as- 
sociation, and appoint a committee. 

Slowly I made the discovery that the average 
organization is not a means of doing anything, 
but a substitute for doing. When a group of 
people feel the call of duty in any direction, civic, 
moral or charitable, they meet, elect officers, make 
speeches, select committees, and go home with a 
sense of having discharged their responsibility. 

The majority of church-members go to divine 
service to ease their conscience, whereas conscience 
should not be eased but obeyed. The typical 
Mason finds in his lodge a substitute for that 

^35 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

brotherllness, charity and helpfulness he ought to 
exert In his dally life. The good party man, Re- 
publican or Democrat, simply uses his party as 
an instrument for his civic sense of duty, as 
heathen folk use a piece of carved wood as a 
god. 

I am not pessimistic. People are good, honest 
and true. But they are so not because of but in 
spite of their institutions. The one inspiring 
thing to belong to is Humanity. The source of 
our real goodness and happiness is the human 
race. The one thing worth being is a man. 
Every little group of men who get off in a corner 
and unite to improve themselves or their fellows 
eventually becomes a conspiracy against mankind. 



136 



THE DESTROYERS 

IN the long run perhaps the destroyers will be 
found to have done quite as much for the prog- 
ress of the race as the builders have done. We 
praise the constructive thinkers and the men who 
do things, and we curse roundly the destructive 
thinkers and the men who undo. Possibly we 
are right, but possibly not altogether right. In 
our own bodies we have complicated machinery, 
vital organs whose whole business is to destroy, 
to eliminate, to remove waste. If these organs 
stop we die. It is the same way in society. The 
whole tribe of so-called infidels, Strauss, Renan, 
Voltaire, Ingersoll and their kind, have removed a 
lot of waste from religion, have excreted a vast 
amount of poison from our faith, which, left in, 
would have fevered and ruined us. So the 
anarchists, the pessimists, the doubters and op- 
ponents of all sorts may be called the kidneys of 
the social organism. All growth Is not only 
a process of upbuilding, but also of tearing down. 
Thousands of houses must be wrecked and taken 

137 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

to the rubbish heap before the city becomes beauti- 
ful. And in society rank and pernicious customs, 
once good, it may be, are to be undone. And a 
growing love of goodness that advances with our 
apprehension of ourselves and the universe, de- 
mands a continual demolition of old shacks and 
huts of belief that have become unsanitary. 



13B 



HERETICS 

THE slums are always orthodox. The 
drunkard, gambler, thief and the outlaw- 
class generally will tell you they " want their re- 
ligion straight," they have no use for people who 
profess to be pious whose piety is not of the most 
conservative, conventional, old-time variety. 

The " smart set " is always orthodox. They 
do not go to church often, but when they do go 
they want to attend where it is preeminently re- 
spectable and unquestioned. 

Heretics all occupy the middle ground. I 
never knew a thoughtful doubter whose piety was 
militant or whose impiety was flagrant. 

Robert G. IngersoU should not be classed with 
heretics; nor Voltaire nor Buechner. They 
really belong to the propagandists. They had a 
sort of reversed orthodoxy. 

The heretic Is of different temper. A sort of 
mild light plays about him. He has more light 
than heat. 

Pure heretics are Baruch Spinoza, Joubert, 

139 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Coleridge and Dr. Eliot of Harvard. Such as 
these are the true non-combatlvc souls. 

To them there Is something better than build- 
ing up the faith or tearing it down ; it is liberty, or 
the right of faith to grow or fail unaided and un- 
hindered by any force outside of itself. 



140 



MONEY 

MONEY has been called the root of all evil. 
It Is the fashion for morallzers to curse It. 
Meanwhile we each of us seek It. But this Is the 
evil In money: Its segregative function. By this 
I mean Its tendency to separate men from one 
another. The conserving, saving, redeeming 
forces In the race, such as love, labor and wor- 
ship, operate to bind men together. Wealth 
disjoins. As soon as a man becomes rich he 
moves to the suburbs. The richer he becomes 
the thicker are his walls, the wider Is his park and 
the higher his fence. He begins to take his 
pleasures In exclusive forms, such as select clubs, 
expensive wines and private yachts. This Is the 
peculiar poison In money. For whatever draws 
one aside from the common lot Is vicious. Caste, 
hereditary nobility and hierarchies have bred all 
manner of physical, social and moral pests be- 
cause they fenced off portions of the human race. 
The Devil Is the father of all fences. Plutocracy 
Is the last enemy of democracy. Humanity has 

141 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

still a long way to go and many deep lessons to 
learn before it shall find the wisdom and the 
courage to sweep away its last divisional force, 
the irresponsible control of wealth by the indi- 
vidual. . There is but one problem before the 
world; it is: How can we get together? 



142 



GOVERNMENT AND MORALS 

AN expert In Sunday journalism Is quoted as 
saying that there are but two themes of un- 
failing Interest In popular literature, money and 
women. I think this Is true. More, I think 
that, far from amounting to a cynical charge that 
the times are Impatient of anything but luxury 
and sensuality, far from being a shameful con- 
fession, It Is a noble and heartening truth. 

In former days, when power was divided be- 
tween heredity and superstition, money meant 
only luxury. The divine right of property was 
kept under by the divine right of kings. Now- 
adays the king has gone; the real government Is 
money. And we arc Interested in money simply 
because one of the highest concerns of men Is gov- 
ernment. The strong interest in money means 
the slow reaching up of the principles of democ- 
racy to learn and to tame and to use this. Its real 
governing power. 

As for women, the ultimate basis of morality, 
and of all nobility of life, lies In the sex ques- 

143 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

tion. The ethical quality of living men and 
women, and the physical and spiritual quality of 
the unborn, depends upon the vigor and the con- 
trol of the procreatlve Instincts. 

Underneath the vast turmoil and creaking, 
struggle and outcry, In newspapers, novels and 
politics, about the money power, the gilded prof- 
ligates and the brutal " interests," and about 
romantic affection, scandal, passion and divorce, 
the race is slowly finding Itself, and working out, 
In Its world-wide workshop and In centuries of 
time, the two problems which most deeply con- 
cern It — Government and Morals. 



144 



THE MORAL VALUE OF THE ARTS 

THE American people do not yet appreciate 
the moral value of the arts. We are still 
barbarous enough to class music and painting and 
the theater among the amusements: they rank a 
little higher than baseball. We are wrong. 
They belong to the assets of civilization. They 
exercise an important function in assisting to re- 
deem the nation from brutishness. In reality, 
they are a part of " the Kingdom of Heaven." 
We come into this world as little animals; we 
ought to go out as great souls. An old man 
ought to be more beautiful than a youth, for the 
latter tingles with animal spirits while the former 
should be radiant with a finer force. That this 
is not the case, that we dread old age, shows we 
have not yet learned what it means to live. To 
live is simply to become more and more of a spirit 
and less and less of a brute. Religious emotion 
is of great help here, but it is not enough. 
Benvenuto Cellini, as we see In his autobiography, 
passed from his exaltation in reading Paul's 

145 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Epistles to the depths of disgusting immorality 
— even murder. His religion was not to blame 
for his coarseness; but the instance illustrates the 
wider need of souls. 

We need, with religion, everything that brings 
the point of our main and habitual satisfaction 
away from the body and over into the mind and 
heart. Science, business and the arts are hand- 
maidens of worship. Not that the body's appe- 
tites are wicked. They are good, for God made 
them. But He also made hogs. More and 
more, as life unfolds, the bracts of flesh should fall 
away, while the lily of the soul whitens and sweet- 
ens to perfection. All the fiery forces of the body 
pass over into the soul, as the dark juices of the 
mold rise into the fragrant petals of the flower. 



146 



THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 

WHY should not every child be taught In 
school the history of thought? Just to 
know what have been the speculations of men in 
other ages goes a long way toward keeping us 
rational. Philosophy seems a good distance re- 
moved from our modern practical day. Yet 
every man has a philosophy. Every man has his 
" views," his working theory of " what is worth 
while," his own notion of his relation to the uni- 
verse, his idea of the meaning of life, death and 
events. And it would pay any man to know what 
wise men have thought upon these subjects. 

One generation ought to stand on the shoulders 
of the one preceding. In business, in science and 
in art we do so; but in philosophy we seem to 
stumble along with the same crude beginnings of 
thought that were thrashed out centuries ago. 
Most of the new fads, new-fangled religions and 
cults that sweep hundreds away from common 
sense were discussed and exhausted before we 
were born. 

147 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Familiarity with some simple, concise history 
of philosophy, studied in the high school, would, 
in later life, " frae monie a blunder free us, and 
foolish notion." The ideas of the Greek philos- 
ophers, of the humanists of the renaissance, of the 
writers in the Aufklacrung period in the eight- 
eenth century, all have their bearing upon the 
underlying theories of life and destiny of to-day. 

Quite aside from one's religious life and creed, 
outside of all doctrinal controversy, lies the need 
of knowing what our fathers thought. We need 
clear, untechnical, unbiased writers to tell us the 
story of the mind. 



148 



SELF 

SELF is a master each man serves and no man 
likes. He is always making us eat what dis- 
tresses us and drink what poisons us. We want 
others to love him, yet we hate him, because he is 
the enemy of love. He discourages religion. 
He is lazy, pleasure-loving and unreasonable. We 
do no good till we flout him, yet it is for his sake 
we do good. We deny him In order to get to 
Heaven, but it is he we want to get to Heaven. 
He is always with us, and we dread to be alone 
with him. 

The story is told of the poet Shelley that he 
had a dream in which he was continually pur- 
sued and thwarted by a strange man whose 
face was veiled. He made a fortune, and the 
stranger took it from him. He achieved fame, 
and the stranger turned It to disgrace. The 
veiled figure frightened him In his bed, spoiled the 
taste of his food at the table, abashed him In 
company and disturbed him in his solitude. At 
last he fell in love with a rare and divine girl. 

149 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

The stranger disappeared. The poet's wooing 
prospered. They were to be married. They 
approached the altar. When the priest was 
about to speak the words that should consummate 
his happiness, suddenly the veiled figure appeared 
and cried: *' I forbid the banns! " " Who are 
you?" said the wretched bridegroom, and 
springing forward tore the veil from the man's 
face. Then with a shriek he fell, seemingly life- 
less, and awoke trembling, from his dream. For 
the face was that of — himself. 



150 



WORLD CONSCIOUSNESS 

MOST of our civic evils are due to a lack of 
organization. We are still afraid of each 
other. It seems almost that the last lesson man- 
kind will learn Is to get together. At present we 
are but half emerged from barbarous individual- 
ism, as a primeval monster half risen from the 
slime. Our lodges, societies, churches, parties, 
unions and nations are but timid experiments at 
real unity. In each of these groups lingers the 
poison of antipathy toward other groups. 

Future generations will smile at our absurd 
provincialism. We have so limited a notion of 
Our Own, and can apply It only to our kin, our 
property, or our fellow members of this or that. 
We shall never heal the deep hurt of humanity 
until we enlarge Our Own to mean the City, the 
Nation and the World. We shall then feel the 
reproach of an unsightly Lake Front as keenly 
as we are shocked at our unclean doorstep. We 
shall not think a city beautiful until the quarters 

151 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

of the poor are beautiful, as lovely as the suburbs 
of the rich. 

Most of all, we need a world-feeling. This 
alone can effectually stop war and tariffs, plagues 
and famines. Such a passion seems a long way 
off, a mere dream. There is one movement that 
embodies it — Christian missions. Much ridi- 
culed and sneered at, the missionary deserves at 
least this credit, that he Is working a world-feel- 
ing. With Charles Darwin and R. L. Stevenson 
we ought to appreciate him. Is he not doing 
more than any of us to bring the time when all 
men's good shall — 

" Be each man's rule, and universal peace 
Lie like a shaft of light across the land, 
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, 
Thro' all the circle of the golden year? " 



152 



ACCURACY 

ACCURACY of thought is a bugaboo that 
has led many a thinker astray. Definite- 
ness is a heathen idol to which many a philosopher 
has wandered. For the sake of distinctness men 
have even denied the self-evident. 

Huxley, for instance, brought into fashion the 
word agnostic. As the world riddle was too 
much for him he canceled everything that lay be- 
yond the confines of the senses and intellect. 

Spinoza and the Eleatics, on the contrary, denied 
the real existence of anything but God (Welt- 
verneinungslehre) . 

So one group denies this and another that, and 
all for the same end, accuracy. Pythagoras 
sought the solution of all things in number. And 
the attempt has been made to represent all ideas 
by algebraic signs (called algorithms) and to 
work out logic as you would your old school 
friend: a^-f2ab+b^=? Charles Dodgson (that 
strange mathematician who, as Lewis Carroll, 
wrote " Alice in Wonderland," the greatest of 

T~S2 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

child stories) composed a " game of logic," in 
which you could prove a proposition by moving 
red and white counters on a sort of checkerboard. 

But It will not do. Life, the universe, God, 
love, all the big, essential things, remain mysteri- 
ous. If you have a clean-cut, accurate notion of 
any one of these things you can be sure of one 
thing — that you are wrong. If your Idea Is 
right It Is certain to be confused. A man born 
blind, as Whately tells us, cannot possibly have a 
definite and true notion of things seen. An honest 
man blind-born will say : " Sight resembles hear- 
ing, in that one can by It perceive objects at a dis- 
tance; and feeling, in that one can tell their shape. 
Somewhere between these two points Is the mys- 
tery of seeing." The cocksure, born-blind theorist 
will say: "Oh, yes: I know just exactly what 
red Is. It is like the sound of a trumpet." 

Remember, therefore, that clearness is not al- 
ways truth, and do not despair if you feel ignorant. 



154 



MEANWHILE 

THE most insistent word in the dictionary is 
meanwhile. That is the tormenting, prag- 
matic word that will not down, but rises like 
Banquo's ghost at all our Utopian feasts. 

I have no trouble with my theories of the 
millennium. I know how we are all going to act 
then, when " no one shall work for money and 
no one shall work for fame," but what am I to 
do now? It is simple enough to be an ideal citi- 
zen in an ideal state, a perfect Christian in a per- 
fect church, a model husband in a model family; 
but what is one to do in the actual present hugger- 
mugger of tousled good and bad? 

I listen with interest to the Socialist or the 
Christian or the Single Taxer or the Philosophical 
Anarchist as he describes the Utopia his scheme 
will certainly produce, but — in the meanwhile ? 

Right and wrong are not simple. The two 
moral strings are usually tied in a hard knot. 
We do a little reasoning, much guessing, and end 
by following our instincts. What mother knows 

155 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

just how to bring up a child? Meanwhile she 
has to bring him up. Who can tell the absolute 
right in politics? Meanwhile one must vote. 
Political party machines reckon on this ignorance 
and helplessness of the voter, who, in despair, 
votes the straight ticket. Who knows the truth 
about the creeds? Meanwhile we must believe 
something. 

This question of what to do meanwhile, this 
difficult adjustment of all the elements of circum- 
stance and of personality, is one that comes right 
home to the individual; he cannot escape it; no 
general rule, or system, or teacher, or church, or 
party can get this burden off his shoulders. It 
Ts the penalty of freedom. Whoever escapes it 
loses his life. 



ij6 



X 



MY FAMILIAR 

I HAVE a very dear friend — who does not 
exist. He never did exist. It is much better 
so than if he had lived, for then he would have to 
pass away, and I should be Inconsolable. 

This friend is of imagination all compact, 
but none the less real for all that; far more real, 
indeed, than the flesh-and-bloods. He has no 
face nor form ; I never saw him and do not want 
to see him. He is closer to me than ever the 
eye or ear could bring him. 

He Is the man with whom I hold long conver- 
sations when I am alone. After I come home 
from the opera he keeps humming tunes inside 
my ear. He brings to me, when I am dropping 
off to sleep, moving pictures of what has hap- 
pened during the day. 

Sometimes we are happy together, and I whistle 
as I walk and smile as I work. Sometimes we 
are utterly wretched, and he prods me and taunts 
me and reproaches me; and at those tirnes life Is 
nauseous and I want to quit. I count It the great- 

157 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

est triumph of my life that I am getting along 
with him more comfortably every year. We 
have come to be real good fellows. 

If you ask me how I think of the things I write 
or say I will tell you a secret: I do not Invent 
them; he tells them all to me. When he Is of a 
mind to talk I can write; when he grows taciturn 
I can do nothing. 

I said we are friends : I must alter that. I 
do not love him. He Is simply my Indispensable 
companion. I do not know who he is. But all 
my days he is going to stay by me, and up to 
the article of death he will be whispering, debat- 
ing, cozening, applauding, hissing, right by my 
side. I hope he will like me, for after death I 
fancy he will have something to say. He is my 
other self. 



158 



DEMOCRACY AND WEALTH 

fTT^WO children are born, the one in a mansion, 
X the other in the slums. To number one we 
hand on a silver platter the power over the lives 
of thousands of his fellows — that is, money. 
Number two we damn with an environment of 
poverty. It is not a square deal. The babies 
were not consulted about coming among us. 

The only safe rule in any matter Is justice. It 
Is not just to appoint one child to power and the 
other to penury. 

A Rothschild's son is made king of millions 
by the same line of argument used in making Louis 
XVI king of France : he is his father's son. The 
modern world has no ruler over the supplies of 
life save money. And we continue to choose our 
real Kaisers by methods which in politics we dis- 
carded a hundred years ago. 

Justice demands no man should be allowed to 
come into the control of a great wealth-mass who 
has not been elected by the people — that is, who 

159 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

has not earned It; for earning money Is, In a way, 
equivalent to popular election. 

This Is applying the principle of democracy to 
wealth. Wealth Is all the real government we 
have. We must make It responsible. We need 
a new Rousseau and a new social contract. 

I believe some people ought to be rich and 
some poor; some ought to live In palaces and eat 
quail and ride In automobiles, and some ought to 
gnaw the crust. But in each case the man ought 
to earn his lot. Equality Is an idle dream. It is 
immoral even; but justice Is perfectly practicable. 

But, if no inheritance, what Incentive would a 
man have to work? Answer: the same Incentive 
a man has to become President of the United 
States, or a distinguished scientist, or an artist 
— can he pass these personal emoluments and at- 
tainments on to his son ? 



1 60 



REFLECTED SOULS 

THE soul sees itself in the world. The lover 
is not enraptured with his mistress but with 
his glorified self in her eyes. The bandits who 
formerly inhabited the Alps saw nothing grand 
in the Vale of Chamonix. The Indians of Amer- 
ica's primeval forests were not awed and uplifted 
by those "God's first temples"; they were wait- 
ing behind the secular oaks with the tomahawk 
to brain their enemy. " I never saw a sunset like 
that," said a man to Turner, regarding one of that 
artist's paintings. " Don't you wish you could? " 
was Turner's reply. 

It is not the horses you admire in " The Horse 
Fair," it is the soul of Rosa Bonheur; it is Land- 
seer that is great, and not his dogs. It is not 
the peasants in " The Angelus," but the per- 
sonality of Millet that affects you. You might 
see a thousand dogs, horses and peasants and never 
be charmed. 

" Art thou he that troubleth Israel? " said ras- 
cally Ahab to the Prophet Elijah. The vile 

i6i 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Roman world accused the apostles of " turning 
the world upside down." Nero burned the 
Christians for destroying Rome. The Pharisees 
said to Jesus: "Thou hast a devil." The 
united opinion of all the devious and crafty politi- 
cians and gargantuan trusts is that the reformer is 
a mischief-maker. 

I care nothing for what you claim to be your 
own motives, for most men deceive themselves; 
but let me hear what kind of motives you habitj 
ually impute to others and I can easily tell the 
kind of man you are. 



162 



&■ 



THE THEATER 

THE theater is destined to become, If It Is 
not already, the greatest moral force among 
us, for good or bad. Henrik Ibsen showed him- 
self to be of prophetic mind when he chose the 
drama as the vehicle of his message. As a 
preacher or novelist he would have passed: as a 
dramatist he will abide. 

The reason for the theater's ethical power Is 
this : that the mind does all Its real learning while 
It is being amused. Very few lessons stay by us 
that we work to get. The Intellect and heart do 
not grow by making effort, but by pleasurable 
exercise. " Which of you by taking thought 
can add one cubit to his stature? " 

The great teachers understood this law. Jesus 
taught in stories. The gist of PestalozzI and 
Froebel Is that the child learns by play. So do 
grown persons. Nothing has such moral dynamic 
as amusement. 

Play Is not the Devil's ; It Is Nature's, It Is God's 
method of development. 

163 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

Some day every little town in America will have 
its municipal theater right alongside of its munici- 
pal church. The coming common-sense that will 
abolish sectarianism will cease to neglect and de- 
spise amusement and will manage its drama as 
carefully as its public school. 



164 



'V 



DESIRES 

THE will has no sense, as Schopenhauer and 
Edward von Hartmann tell us. That is, 
when you dig down to where an act of the will 
starts, you find not logic and reason, but dumb de- 
sire. 

Our desires are wholly unintelligent. They 
have absolute disregard for Cause a-nd Effect, 
which is the very essence of Intelligence. For in- 
stance: I want to be rich, but not to do the 
work that causes riches; I want to be warm, but 
not to wear my overcoat; the child wants both 
to eat overmuch candy and to feel good ; the want- 
power in us is utterly unintelligent. 

Our desires arc also non-moral. We want 
things without reference to whether they are good 
or bad, decent or shameful, helpful or injurious. 
Not that we really do immoral things, but we all 
want to do them, at some time or other, and our 
moral sense Is something that comes later and 
suppresses or allows the desires. 

Now it is precisely these desires that constitute 
i6s 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

character. These are what we are. They can 
be trained and changed, but it is a long and dif- 
ficult task. And this task is the whole of culture, 
of education and of religion. A man is never 
free and cultured and good until he automatically 
and subconsciously wants the good, the true and 
the beautiful. It is not enough to will these 
things and to do them. They must get rooted in 
our instincts. 



i66 



THE FOUR CLOCK STROKES OF 
HISTORY 

IT is a curious fact that the vine of this human 
stock bears Its best fruit In clusters. If you 
draw a hundred-year arc from 450 to 350 B. C. 
you will include about all of " the glory that 
was Greece." Your arc will touch, if not In- 
clude, the time of the plays of Sophocles, Euripides 
and Aristophanes; the histories of Thucydldes, 
Xenophon and Herodotus, the poems of Anacreon, 
the philosophies of Anaxagoras, Aristotle, De- 
mocrltus, Socrates, and Plato; the exploits of 
Pericles and Alciblades; the oratory of Demos- 
thenes, and the art of Phidias and Praxiteles. 
Did you realize all this was In so short a time? 

Draw another arc from 50 B. C. to 50 A. D. 
and you will touch not only the day of Jesus, but 
of the great group of those men who made " the 
grandeur that was Rome " : Horace, Vergil, 
Cicero and the great Csesars. 

Draw now a third arc from 1450 to 1550, 
roughly taken, and you will cover the most re- 

167 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

markable period of history; in Italy you will find 
all the great masters of art, Raphael, Angelo, 
Leonardo, Titian, Correggio; In North Europe 
the origin of printing, gunpowder and the Co- 
pernican theory, besides Luther, Erasmus and 
Calvin; in England Colet, Linacre, Sir Thomas 
More and John Knox, and in the Spanish penin- 
sula such names as Columbus, Vasco da Gama, 
Magellan and Albuquerque. 

A fourth arc, from 1820 to 1920, will span the 
great modern era of invention, including the 
wonders of steam and electricity. 

These are the pulse beats of humanity. These 
are the striking of the clock of history. 

To know the history of the world you need to 
study only four centuries. 



168 



THE CITY 

IT is the fashion, I know, to write against cities, 
and many writers (who could not be tempted 
from New York) describe the joys of the coun- 
tryside. But I confess to feeling within mc the 
strong tug that draws the swarm of my kind to 
the thick centers of population. I distinctly love 
cities, and the bigger the better. I enjoy taking a 
soul-bath in this my humanity as I thread the teem- 
ing streets. By day the roar of the elevated 
trains, the rumble of the truck wagons, the rattle 
of the street cars, the occasional mad rush and 
clang of the patrol wagon or fire engine, the tur- 
bulent river of men and women coursing the 
sidewalk and, over all, the grim cliffs of steel 
and stone full of driving business — it is all as 
If I were in the engine-room of civilization and 
listening to the crashing looms that are weaving 
the future. And at night it is as exciting as a 
battle to stand in the street when the theater 
crowds are coming out, and see the people flash- 
ing and turning like breakers of the human sea, 

169 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

pouring their full stream of life about me; to 
hear the sharp artillery of the automobiles, the 
clatter of horse's hoofs on the stones, the yells of 
the carriage-tenders, the shrill cry of newsboys, the 
drone of hawkers, the swish of women's dresses, 
the shattered fragments of laughter and speech 
— oh, for a poet to say the spell and beauty of it I 
The deep instincts of men draw them together. 
It is a curious thing that when Saint John saw 
Heaven opened it was not a Holy Farm he be- 
held, but a Holy City. Mankind started in the 
Garden; it moves toward the New Jerusalem. 



170 



IS RELIGION DECLINING? 

IS religion growing or losing ground in our 
modern civilization? In this, as in all ques- 
tions, we must define our terms. Nine men out 
of ten seek to answer the question by inquiring 
whether the churches are waxing or waning. 
But the first thing to be settled is whether the 
progress of religion and of the church mean the 
same thing. Is religion inseparably bound up 
with the organization? If it is, then religion Is 
dying out, for there is no doubt that the church 
has less leadership and influence upon the intel- 
lectual life of men than ever before in history. 
The ecclesiastic, as such, has ceased to exert any 
considerable power in politics, art and letters, and 
with the downfall of authority In modern thought 
has been entirely banished from science and philos- 
ophy. Even In social life the priest and parson 
rule no more, as In the good old times, and are 
merely tolerated. 

But If religion Is considered to be a spiritual 
force among men, a force of which its various 

171 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

organizations arc but by-products, then the case 
is wholly different. It resolves itself into a ques- 
tion whether there is more moral motive, more 
recognition of the high spiritual laws, more sense 
of God and more of the nobler virtues now than 
ever before. And to this the answer is an em- 
phatic Yes. 

For there never was a time when pure right 
and wrong were more strictly appealed to in 
judging men and institutions, when more work 
was being done for the simple love of humanity, 
and when movements and parties based themselves 
more absolutely upon the principles of funda- 
mental justice. 

Religion belongs to the race, not to any one or 
more institutions. 



172 



THE WICKEDEST MAN 

I WONDER what kind of a person the very 
wickedest possible man in the world would 
be. He would not be, I fancy, a person of 
gigantic passions, uncontrollable heats and 
wolfish animalisms, but rather one in whom all 
passion had died and left him stone cold. In 
all desires there is a saving human element. 
Evil ascends from the merely human range into 
diabolical perfection as it leaves the region of 
heart and blood and becomes purely curious and 
unfeeling. Our Imaginary monster, therefore, 
would not want anything; he would not care. 
He would be past greed, lust, drunkenness and 
anger, for there is hope for men in those sins. 
Jesus had no harsh words for the thieves and 
vice-bound souls ; He was, indeed, called " The 
Friend of Sinners " ; but He cursed the Pharisees, 
who were not sinners, but worse. Goethe says 
of Mephistopheles : " It is written on his brow, 
he never loved a human soul." In the Bud- 
dhistic belief Heaven is the vanishing of desire: 

173 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

in the Christian theory this seems to be hell. 
For in Dante's Inferno, when the two poets had 
reached DIs, the very bottom and extreme of the 
home of wicked souls, they found the place frozen 
solid and Satan fixed in eternal Ice, flapping his 
wings and sending his influence throughout the 
world in cold pulsations. 



174 



TRAINING THE WILL 

^ I AHE old-fashioned division of the personality 
X was Into three parts — the Intellect, the 
sensibility and the will. We have all sorts of 
institutions and systems for training the first two, 
3ut what have we for developing the last? The 
ntellect is exercised at school by arithmetic and 
geography and the like; there are institutes and 
clubs for Improving the sensibility — that Is to 
say, for music, painting and so on ; but where shall 
the will be sent to school? It Is our most im- 
portant third. In a huge ocean liner all parts 
of the ship, men and goods and machinery, are 
going eastward, except the propeller, which goes 
west. The speed of the vessel one way depends 
on the velocity of the screw in the opposite direc- 
tion. So a man's real progress in character de- 
pends upon his will, his resistance-dynamic. Bet- 
ter an ignorant man than an educated man with 
a flabby will. Freedom Is a curse to any people 
who have not learned self-control. The will Is 
a little fragment of Almighty God lodged In the 

175 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

human soul. So long as the will remains, for it 
is the spirit's citadel, no man can be conquered. 
" There is nothing good or evil save in the will," 
said Epictetus. And Confucius' saying was: 
" The general of a large army may be defeated, 
but you cannot defeat the determined mind of a 
peasant." 



176 



INEFFICIENCY 

WE do love theories that coddle us. The 
reason many people take up with schemes, 
the gist of which is that society is all wrong and 
ought to be made over, is not the truth these 
schemes contain, but the fact that they throw upon 
government and environment the blame which 
properly rests on weak wills and incompetent 
hands. 

What Is the bane of housekeeping? Incom- 
petent servants. What is the matter with the res- 
taurant business? Incompetent help. What is 
the matter with any business, making shoes or cut 
glass or razors or boilers or looms or houses? 
The trouble is to get men who will do what they 
are paid for doing. What is the weakness of the 
public school system? Inefficient teachers. Ask 
the man at the head of any business his greatest 
worry and he will tell you it is to get good men.^ 
And by good he does not mean pious nor won- 
derful men, but simply men capable and willing to 
do their work. 

177 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

One of our favorite types of fiction is the man 
who " only asks a chance to work." There arc 
doubtless some such and they deserve sympathy. 
But the prime cause of nonemployment is plain 
inefficiency. The world is growing more and 
more uncomfortable for the man who will not 
" make good." 

" Creation's cry goes up 

From age to cheated age, 
Give us the men who do the work 
For which they get the wage ! " 



178 



BROTHERHOOD 

I THINK most men of candid mind must 
admit that within them lies the possibility 
of being any kind of a criminal. From any 
patch of earth, warmed and watered, will sprout 
weeds: and In the purest soul lie hidden germs 
of all manner of wickedness. An honest and re- 
spected man of forty who Is not in the peniten- 
tiary ought to be thankful. Give due credit to 
our force of character, to our Innate probity and 
to our religion, and still we must recognize that 
chance and circumstance (or you may call It grace 
of God) have stopped us many a time at the edge 
of a precipice. 

I make bold to believe that the habitants of 
heaven and I are akin, and the exalted relation- 
ship thrills mc; but I know also that they who 
creep through the dusky byways of the slums and 
they who fester In the solitude of prisons have 
their share in my blood. My soul Is a part of 
that larger soul which is humanity. As my body 
could not live out of the air so my soul could not 

179 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

live outside of my race. I cannot be all bad so 
long as there are good men and women; I cannot 
be perfectly happy while any human being weeps ; 
I cannot be all pure while my brothers are vile. 
Christ uttered the cry of humankind when He 
said: " I in them and they in me I " 

Once an old anchorite died alone In his cave 
on Mount Sinai; he had tried to escape humanity; 
he could not, and no man can; he confessed his 
defeat by writing upon the wall this line of 
Terence: "Homo sum et humani a me nil 
alienum puto — I am a man and nothing human 
Is alien to me," 



i8o 



^ 



THE WRITER 



MANY writers strive to tell something new. 
They need to be reminded of the truth 
contained in a fine passage which Goldsmith 
struck out of his " Vicar of Wakefield." Doctor 
Johnson mentions it: "When I was a young 
man, being anxious to distinguish myself, I was 
perpetually starting new propositions. But I 
soon gave this over; for I found that generally 
what was new was false." 

The greatest genius in literature does but ex- 
press for the people what they already know. 
He gives voice to their dumb convictions. He 
seizes the thin, fugacious wisps of fancy in the 
common heart, and to these airy nothings gives 
" a local habitation and a name." Christ did not 
teach humanity. He uttered humanity. Dante 
was called " the voice of ten silent centuries." 
Whoever will be a great writer let him tell us 
the feel of green trees upon the soul, translate the 
pain and pleasure of his household into speech, 
find words that set forth the wonder of the things 

i8i 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

other persons call commonplace, put his car to the 
bosom of the earth in his own dooryard and tell 
us its secrets, melt the crowd of the street in the 
crucible of his creative fancy and distil for us its 
attar. How rare this gift, how difficult its exer- 
cise 1 Wc get a glimpse of the process of real 
authorship in Wordsworth's lines : 

" Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on, 
Through words and things, a dim and perilous way." 



182 



A MARTIAN WILL 

SOME time ago, I have forgotten when and 
where, I heard how men make their wills 
on the planet Mars. There it seems they have 
long since abandoned the primitive folly of pri- 
vate property, and hence in their last testaments 
occupy themselves with bequeathing what they 
really have. A man's will on Mars therefore 
would run something like this: I give and be- 
queath to my wife the memory of my affection; 
to my son John my power of self-control, which 
he needs and which I acquired by great pains; to 
my daughter Julia my ability to hold my tongue 
and my habit of secretiveness, for she talks too 
much; to my son Edward, who is inclined to 
be ambitious, my knowledge of what is worth 
while, to-wit: honor, love and contentment; to 
my sister Alfaretta, who worries, my knack of 
enjoying each day as it comes, and neither brood- 
ing over the past nor apprehending unpleasant- 
ness in the future; to my neighbors I leave my 
peaceful disposition; to the people at large I give 

183 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

back all my goods and chattels, for they came 
from the people; to my friends I leave the joy 
of my loyalty and trust, and to my enemies the 
satisfaction of knowing I am dead; to my pupils 
and a;pprentices I leave my skill; to the devil I 
give my sins, weaknesses and mistakes ; and to God 
I give my soul, for He made it, put it in this 
world and takes it out, for reasons best known to 
Himself. 



"184 



CINDERELLA 

IT is a truism of philosophy that all joy comes 
from the Inside of one's self. The whole list 
of teachers, Including Socrates, Seneca, Jesus, 
Solomon and Mrs. Eddy, unite on this point that 
happiness is from one's own heart and not from 
one's surroundings. But we have neglected to 
emphasize the converse of this proposition, to-wit : 
that our sorrows come from others. Yet this Is 
true. The gist of every tragedy, from iEschylus 
to Sudermann and Ibsen, is the situation of the 
soul crushed under the Iron rim of Institutions, 
martyred by other men's moral codes or tortured 
by society's conventions. The phases of the 
eternal tragedy are suicide, poison, the stake — 
Hamlet, Socrates, Joan of Arc. 

It is strange how the human soul fears the only 
source of Its happiness — itself. The shamed 
spirit of man dreads nothing so much as the sight 
of Its own face. 

As children we want to play king, mamma, or 
anybody but ourselves. The newsboy cries In a 

7 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

singsong ; he would blush to use his natural tones. 
The parson must put on a conventional voice with 
his gown; if he should speak in a common house 
or street voice his congregation would be shocked 
as by an indecent exposure of his mind. 

Originally sprung from apes we achieve the 
last rung of civilization when we have completely 
monkeylzed ourselves and act only by imitation. 
One of the definitions of " a natural " in the 
dictionary is " a born fool." " Simple " likewise 
has for one of its meanings " one who is deficient 
in intelligence." 

We are ashamed of what is our own, proud of I 
all that is borrowed; ashamed of our skin, proud 
of our clothes; bringing forth our own opinion 
timidly and flourishing a quotation as a revolver; 
eating what we like in the kitchen and eating what 
we detest at banquets; neglecting those we love 
to be with prominent persons who bore us; calling 
our own belief doubt and other men's belief the 
true faith. Our mental table is crowded with 
distinguished guests; the soul, a poor Cinderella, 
sits in the ashes by the hearth. Yet when the 
Prince comes he will have none but Cinderella. 



i86 



THE INSTITUTION 

I HERE record my very serious conclusion, 
toward which my mind has been steadily 
gravitating for twenty years, that in the long 
run, when the final accounts are balanced, all 
institutions will be found to have done quite as 
much harm as good. The real good forces are 
purely personal. The real good Is done on 
earth by certain individuals, as Moses, Jesus, 
Luther and Lincoln. Having appeared among 
men, this good force Is straightway institution- 
alized, whereupon It begins to deteriorate. 
When It becomes so bad as to be unbearable a 
new hero appears out of the blue and smashes it. 
Then around that new hero's personality gathers 
a new Institution, which in turn becomes inevita- 
bly an enemy to mankind. I am not one of those 
who hope for the millennium by the triumph of 
any Institution, but solely by individual effort. 
The progress of the race in ideals and morals is 
never by conformity, but by perpetual revolt. 
The only redeeming force In humanity is the Im- 

187 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

pulse given to it by good men. The effort to or- 
ganize this impulse, to create some machinery to 
make it permanent, is vain. Our only hope Is in 
the continued advent of free and potent souls. 



i88 



SANITY AND VARIATION 

T T THEN you sec your late grandmother ride 
VV in through the doorway seated upon a 
pink elephant, which rolls upon wheels and puffs 
steam like a locomotive, and when the old lady 
suddenly vanishes, and the animal sits down to 
the piano and begins to play and sing, you con- 
clude one of two things: cither that you are 
dreaming or that you are crazy. For the essence 
of dreams and of insanity is one and the same, 
to-wit: the mind is looking at one object and can- 
not look away. A sane man, when he has a 
strange experience, pinches himself — that is, he 
appeals to his environment. 

The secret of sanity is orientation. Hence the 
danger in a fixed purpose or an unwavering atten- 
tion. You can find the lost collar-button better 
if you will look rapidly here and there than if 
you gaze too intently in one place. To see a 
squirrel among the tree leaves the eye must dart 
about and not keep to one spot. Our minds are 
by nature discursive. It is harder to listen to 

189 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

a sermon that sticks to the text than to the vaude- 
ville man who talks of " cabbages and kings." 

Hence If you have worried long over a prob- 
lem put it away and knock about a while; you 
will return to it with an access of sanity. Long, 
uninterrupted concentration upon one subject 
tends to hypnotize. I have seen some people 
who, it seemed to me, ought occasionally to alter 
the petition, "Lord, teach us how to pray," and 
ask, " Lord, teach us how to play." 



190 



BELIEF AND FANCY 

/CERTAINLY the most abused word in 
V>i the mouths of men is " believe." Eng- 
lishmen employ more frequently and with more 
accuracy the word " fancy." Our slovenly habit 
of believing all sorts of things gets us into no 
end of trouble. For usually the common run of 
men, when they say they believe this or that, 
simply mean that they have a vivid mental picture 
of it. The slipshod mind " believes " whatever 
actively stimulates the imagination and the emo- 
tions. How much more honest the orthodox 
Turk would be if he should say " I fancy " instead 
of " I believe there is no god but God and that 
Mahomet is His prophet? " (Of course this 
does not apply to my own sect, which to question 
far be it from me I) Belief is a condition of 
mind automatically produced by evidence. It is 
bloodless as the rule of three. I deserve no 
credit, no blame for it. Fancy Is warm, full of 
desire and volition. I fancy I am beloved, that 
to-morrow will be gay, that there is somewhat 

191 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

beyond the grave. I believe that water freezes 
at 32 and boils at 212 Fahrenheit. I cast no 
slur on common "beliefs"; they are misnamed, 
that Is all. In the imagination, not In logical con- 
clusions, lie the makings of character. Heaven 
and hell are not facts to be proved. They are 
Images to be conserved. So Omar: 

" I sent my soul throughout the invisible, 
Some secret of that after life to spell, 
And by and by my soul returned to me, 

And whispered, I myself am heaven and hell." 



192 



SIN AND CONSERVATISM 



in 



THE one department of human activity ... 
which there has been no progress is sin. 
There are only ten commandments, and having 
broken them there is nothing to do but to break 
them again. In all other directions the race 
has improved; for we have railways instead of 
horses, typewriters instead of quills, steam radia- 
tors for open fires, not to mention washing-ma- 
chines, telephones, matches, democracies, soda- 
water, rubber heels and hatpins. But men are 
getting drunk nowadays on Clark Street, Chi- 
cago, and in the lobster palaces of Broadway, 
New York, and along the Boulevard Poissoniere, 
in Paris, just about as Noah did when he stepped 
from the ark and found the bottle. The 
painted ladies of our day have hardly improved 
upon Thais, Lais and Company. The modern 
murderer goes about his work very much after 
:he manner of Cain; the latest domestic scandals 
n Kansas City or Pittsburg follow the lines of 
David or the wife of Marcus Aurelius; and the 

193 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

liars and thieves of Chicago and St. Louis have 
advanced none beyond Ananias and Judas. 

Hell is objectionable principally because it is 
such a bore. People go there in droves, each 
because the other goes. When a man starts for 
Heaven he has to break away and fight, and con- 
sequently amounts to something. The longer 1 
live the more I am amazed at the limited intelli- 
gence that can keep interested in wickedness, and 
the more I marvel at the sheer creative genius and 
resourcefulness needed in just being good. 



194 



INDIVIDUAL AND INSTITUTION 

THERE are two distinct, apparently op- 
posite, movements in modern thought. 
The one bears toward individualism, urges the 
importance of oneself as against all Institutions 
and the world. In this cult we find Max Stirner, 
Nietzsche and Ibsen. The other tendency is 
toward the mass as opposed to the unit. This 
feeling underlies the vast Socialist growth In 
Europe and America. 

As usual, in complex human affairs, both are 
right. The great task of civilization is to substi- 
tute the civic for the personal consciousness, just 
as the problem of religion is to supplant egoistic 
by altruistic motives. It is a blind, instinctive 
working out of this feeling that has led men to 
organize societies, lodges, churches, parties, na- 
tions and all groups. They have had a dim per- 
ception of the truth that a group-consciousness is 
a nobler thing than a mere individual conscious- 
ness. 

And yet against this solidifying tendency there 
195 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

has always been a revolt of the soul The indi- 
vidual keeps declaring his independence. 

In some way the future and perfect organiza- 
tion or institution will have to be such as not only 
to satisfy man's altruistic, socialistic instinct, but 
also leave room for the utter liberty of the indi- 
vidual, personal feeling. The Universe and I can 
only meet as equals. 



196 



THE ZEITGEIST 

WE do not realize how thoroughly we are 
composed of the Spirit of the Times. 
We have some Individuality, but for the most 
part we are of our age and environment. Cer- 
tain world-thoughts throb through humanity's 
brain, certain world-feelings tingle in the racial 
heart; there are twentieth-century tastes, Ameri- 
can ideas; and of these great ocean-masses of 
cerebration and sensation I contain a drop. 

For most of my notions of honor, purity, kind- 
ness and courage I frankly give credit to the wave 
that lifts me. The mass of which I am a par- 
ticle must also take a good share of the blame for 
my ignorance, stupidity and cruelty. For all that, 
I am still Independent, free and responsible. If 
you can reconcile those two contradictory facts 
you can do more than any philosopher has yet 
done. 

Particularly our estimate of men ought to take 
more into account their Zeitgeist. How much of 
Luther was the mere embodiment of a deep cur- 

197. 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

rent that flowed through German hearts in his 
day? How much of me, or you, is distinct, 
separable and personal, and how much of us is 
but an X sign representing so many kilowatts of 
the spiritual force latent in the mass of men? 

This thought, while it ought not work to make 
us evade responsibility, ought to temper our judg- 
ment of man. No man can resist wholly the 
Zeitgeist, because it is in him as well as around 
him. As Neitzsche says: " Der Geist seiner 
Zeit nicht nur auf ihm liegt, sondern auch in ihm 
ist — The Spirit of his Time is not only round 
about a man, but it is also within him." It is 
like atmospheric pressure, in and upon the body 
the same. 



198 



THE AGREER 

EVERY once in a while you meet the Man 
Who Does Not Agree With You. 
There are still a number of people left over from 
Yesterday who seem to think it is of vital im- 
portance for opinions to agree. There never was 
a more fugitive delusion. 

Goethe says that the Mahometans begin their 
education by learning this principle : that the op- 
posite of every proposition is also true. And 
truly the deeper a mind thinks the more it must 
express itself in antinomies. A paradox Is often 
truer than a postulate. 

Time was, and not long ago, when every news- 
paper had to be a party organ. Stalwart citizens 
also read only such books and periodicals, listened 
to only such preachers, cultivated only such friends 
and mingled with only such people, as agreed 
with their opinions. Such persons reached their 
perfection, perhaps, in a certain class of English 
dignitaries, of whom Emerson said that at a par- 
ticular point there might be heard a certain click 

199 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

in their minds, signifying that henceforth they 
were shut to any new idea. 

We are learning a better unity; not that based 
upon similarity of intellectual conclusions, but 
upon oneness of taste and feeling. My eccle- 
siastical friend who is leagues from me in 
opinion gets next to me when we both try to 
" help a lame dog over a stile." Our doctrines 
may separate us on Sunday, but our hearts come 
together on Monday — at the hospital. Our 
divergent notions make us Republicans, Demo- 
crats and Socialists; our strong common Instincts 
make us all good Americans. 

I ask no man to agree with me; I do not 
always agree with myself: but I would that all 
men loved me. Only in Intellectual liberty can 
there grow up a genuine unity in work and feel- 
ing; as Tacitus has written: " Rara temporum 
felicitate, ubi sentire quae veils, et quae sentlas 
dicere licet — Such being the happiness of the 
times, that you may think as you please, and speak 
as you think." 



200 



MEMORY 

WHAT we call a good memory is really a 
weakness. That is to say, a memory 
which can retain the whole of a book page after one 
reading, and the like. It is oftencr a burden 
than an advantage. It is fatal in a public speaker, 
for it betrays him into plagiarism. 

It is bad for anyone whose work is creative, for 
the greatest task in good writing or painting or 
musical composition is to escape the thralldom of 
things we remember. Almost all of the music one 
hears in the comic opera to-day, and almost all 
the books, whether romance, poetry, essays or 
description, strikes us as dry and sterile, because 
it is made of stuff remembered and simply changed 
in form and arrangement. An artist is great in 
proportion as he brushes aside all his masters and 
all he has learned, and gives vent to his soul. 

The best is what Hamerton called " a select- 
ing memory," which means the faculty of choos- 
ing and retaining only the things worth while. It 
is as important to be a good forgetter as it is to 

20I 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

have a good memory. Why should I want to 
keep in my mind the kings of England and the 
dates of the Presidents? Most "memory 
systems " are silly devices to enable us to fill our 
minds with such rubbish. The good memory is 
one which is logical, orderly, automatically ex- 
pelling vast quantities of material, selecting a 
little. 



202 



HEREDITY 

THERE Is a weak spot somewhere in the 
heredity argument. We are told by gen- 
tlemen with a scientific flourish and a professional 
cocksureness that we are never going to get fine 
humans until we breed for fine men as carefully 
as cattle are bred to get fine beeves. Our race 
Is demonstrated to be running to cretins and crim- 
inals because brides and grooms are selected by 
moonlight and by holding hands, and are not nom- 
inated by the state board of health. But some- 
where In the chain of reasoning which is supposed 
to carry the conclusions of the shorthorn pedigree 
book over into human nature, somewhere there is 
a missing link. 

For, as a cold, unscientific fact, the best stock 
of the human race is the scrub. For some reason 
when the Great Man arises he always grows out In 
the woods-pasture and never in the hothouse. In- 
stances: Napoleon, Lincoln, Wagner, Beethoven, 
all the artists from Giotto to Whistler and all the 
writers from Homer to Kipling. 

203 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

We can improve roses and create navel oranges, 
and by selection get cows that give amazing milk, 
but old Bill Jones' boy down on the Okaw bot- 
toms still has a way of intellectually, morally and 
physically surpassing Isaac Newton 2d and John 
Wesley 3d. 

The thing called greatness remains the prop- 
erty of the " Common Herd." 



204 



PROGRESS 

THE enemies to human progress are not the 
bad people but the " good " people. Hu- 
manity moves forward in a very curious way. 
We advance one step ; then we bitterly attack those 
who would have us advance to the next step. 
" Good " people are those who stand for the ex- 
isting order; they not only oppose those who 
break it (the criminals), but also those who would 
improve it (the reformers). A good church 
member is as hard toward a heretic as toward a 
sinner. The men who occupy the Present, with 
its convictions and organizations, fight front and 
rear, and repel the men of the Past and the men 
of the Future. Hence the progressive person is 
often classed with the criminal. " The same 
authority," says a recent writer, " which crucified 
two robbers at Golgotha stretched Jesus Christ 
on the middle cross between." 

There is a modicum of truth in the charge that 
" advanced thinkers " are loosening morality. 
For the mass of men do not think at all, and take 

205 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

their opinions and their morals from existing insti- 
tutions. Naturally, whoever intimates that these 
institutions are not perfect tends to confuse the 
average mind. And, naturally again, those in 
charge of the flock look askance at all progressives. 
Why can't things be let alone? The Pharisees 
thought Jesus was removing all law; the church 
believed Luther to be opening the way for every 
immorality. 

If any man finds himself shunned because of his 
efforts to lead others to new heights, let him cheer 
up ! The proverb runs, " The Good is the enemy 
of the Best." And of Christ it is written, " He 
was numbered with the transgressors." 



206 



THE BENUMBING INFINITE 

ANY thought about the Infinite, and our rela- 
tion to It, has a certain electrical quality 
that benumbs the mind, and acts upon it very much 
as a huge mass of iron deranges a compass. 
Every man is a little crazy In his religion or Ir- 
religion. It Is as if any Idea of so tremendous a 
thing as the universe and Its Ruler, or our in- 
dividual eternal destiny, were too strong liquor 
for mortal brains. 

So there are few people save those of one's 
own sect with whom one can talk religion with 
rational calmness. When belief Is mentioned 
each man retreats to his own peculiar cave, his 
own cyclone cellar he has dug to shelter himself 
from the confusion and terror of the Great Un- 
known. Safe there, he regards the world with a 
superior smile. Most minds are too small to en- 
tertain a religious conviction In the living room 
where it must jostle with common sense, and they, 
therefore, have a spare chamber where their faith 
can dwell in peace undisturbed by reason. To be 

207 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

thoroughly rational and thoroughly devout is not 
impossible, but it is rare. 

Young Goethe wrote of certain good people he 
met In Strassburg as " Menschen von maessigem 
Verstanden, die mit der ersten Religionsempfin- 
dung auch den ersten vernunftigen Gedanken er- 
halten, und denken, das war alles, weil sie anders 
Nichts wissen — People of limited intelligence 
who had received along with their first religious 
impression also their first real thought, and be- 
lieved that was all, because they knew nothing 
else." 



208 



PUNISHMENT 

PLUTARCH In his " De Sera Numlnis Vln- 
dicta " declares that punishment does not so 
much follow upon injustice, but, as he finds in 
Hesiod, the two are of the same nature and spring 
from the same root. The world is going to learn 
some day a truth that now seems an absurdity — 
that all punishment is wrong and worse than use- 
less. We are learning it in some degree. The 
slow progress of criminal law has been steadily 
away from cruel retaliation. But we have yet 
far to go. Any warden will tell you that the peni- 
tentiary never reformed a criminal. It makes 
many an ordinary man vicious. To hang, im- 
prison or even fine a man for an offense is of the 
same grade as shooting a horse because he kicks 
us. In the coming state there will be no such 
thing as punishment. Society will learn to try 
and remedy Its own blunders. The lawbreaker 
Is diseased. It is our business to cure him and not, 
as in savage tribes, to beat him to drive out the 
devil. The criminal element of our country is in- 

209 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

creased and not decreased by legal punishments. 
Christ and Tolstoy are absolutely right. We 
pooh-pooh their method. Our great-grandchil- 
dren will adopt It. 



210 



FORCE TILL RIGHT IS READY 

I WONDER if those well-meaning persons who 
proclaim that one should " always do what is 
absolutely right " realize the utter impracticability 
of their preachment. As a matter of fact, I can 
act In accordance with the standards of perfect jus- 
tice in only a very limited sphere of affairs, purely 
personal and individual. The moment I take my 
place in any of the world's Institutions I become 
particeps criminis to a good deal of ancient and 
stubborn wrong. And the only way to make 
one's force felt in the world's work is through the 
world's institutions. In an Imperfect society like 
ours whatever is practical Is half unjust, else it 
would not be practical. Social conventions are 
how often cruel in certain Instances I Yet society 
would tumble to chaos without these canons. The 
perfectly good laws of business work inequity 
sometimes, the established life of the church has 
hardened and repelled certain souls, and practical 
politics at Its best has forced many a statesman 
into positions where his conscience made outcry. 

211 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

When the clear and rational mind analyzes any 
established law or custom it never fails to find 
plenty of old fraud. The world's sense of right 
as represented in its conventions grows slowly; 
the individual conscience is always far in advance. 
But that world-sense is tremendously more power- 
ful, a vast tidal wave, as compared with the in- 
dividual breaker. Matthew Arnold calls atten- 
tion to the beautiful saying of Joubert: C'cst 
la force ct le droit qui reglent toutes choses dans 
le monde; la force en attendant le droit — 
Force and right are the governors of the world; 
force till right is ready." 



212 



LIFE AND LITERATURE 

LITERATURE is intrinsically false. It may 
" hold the mirror up to life," but it is a 
cracked mirror, or warped. Novels have plots; 
in real life there is no plot, only an undramatic 
tangle. Plays have climaxes; in real life there is 
no climax, we go on living. Shakespeare had to 
kill Romeo and Juliet; think of their growing up 
into fat and stubborn Montagues and Capulets! 

In books are characters; as a matter of fact we 
are none of us characters, but all sorts and kinds 
jumbled into one personality. Newspapers seek 
the unusual; but the unusual is not true; only the 
ordinary is true. The truth is not worth mention- 
ing. As dust and other impurity gives color to 
the sunset, so lies and abnormalities are the beauty 
of letters. 

Life is happy. Literature is tragic. As 
histories give a hundred pages to a day's battle 
and five lines to fifty years of peace so the daily 
journal, the romance and the drama are made up 
of the adventitious growths and by-products of 

213 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

life. The actual existence of a people finds no ex- 
pression : the daily paper Is a news bulletin of so- 
cial disease. 

We read too much. Get back to cows, trees 
and kittens, to the day's work and eating and 
sleeping, to earth and sky and water. There you 
will find that existence is a vast ocean of con- 
tentment, while literature Is the sputter of Its 
waves. When you try to translate life into litera- 
ture, you meet the fate Emerson describes : 

**I wiped away the weeds and foam, 
I fetched my sea-born treasures home; 
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things 
Had left their beauty on the shore, 
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar." 



214 



-r 



LOVE'S TRAGEDY 

ONCE there was a man who loved a woman 
with all his strength. He took her to wife. 
They were poor. She washed, ironed, sewed and 
economized for him and grew to love him deeply. 
She bore him children. They were all very happy 
those days. Afterward he grew rich. He en- 
joyed his money because It enabled him to heap 
benefits upon her. As time went on her love 
gradually changed from her husband to her chil- 
dren. The more he sought her the more she with- 
drew. Only her children could awaken her ten- 
derness, her sparkle and quickened pulse. Other 
women tried to tempt him, but he wanted only the 
woman he loved. So he consulted the Oracle, 
and the Oracle said: 

"It Is all quite simple. You do all the giving 
and she the receiving. The proverb, ' It is more 
blessed to give than to receive ' was not intended 
merely for missionary collections. It Is a deep 
law of life. She loves the children because they 
are a constant drain upon her heart. She gives 

215 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

unceasingly to them; that feeds love. She takes 
from you; so love sickens." 

"Then," said the man, "what shall I do? I 
want my wife. I cannot deny her. I cannot mis- 
treat her. Tell me what to do." 

And the Oracle replied: "You can do noth- 
ing. You cannot change your nature." 

" Oh," exclaimed the man, " I feel like the 
devil." 

" Quite the contrary," replied the Oracle, " for 
now you know how God feels." 



2i6 



r 



MODESTY 



WHAT is the origin of modesty? How did 
the race ever come by the sentiment that 
certain things were shameful ? I have a suspicion 
that the philosopher who shall solve this riddle 
win discover at the same time the core of religion. 
There seems to be some relation between the bodily 
sense of shame and the moral sense of sin. Un- 
conscious innocence is not so lovely as the inno- 
cence that blushes. So love also is cousin to 
modesty and religion. It Is a fundamental in- 
stinct of a human being to conceal life's arcana. 
And deep in the unfathomed heart of us lies the 
secret of the infinite. Life, love and God, these 
three things are of an utterly private nature. To 
touch them with the careless hand is like touching 
the eyeball. The oriental races naively expose 
their acts of worship ; the Mussulman spreads his 
prayer rug In the market place, the Latin peoples 
of Southern Europe do their rites of worship with 
entire indifference to the bystander, while the 
Anglo-Saxon would be as ashamed of being caught 

217 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

saying his prayers as stealing apples. It is sig- 
nificant that the Anglo-Saxon's modesty rises to 
prudery and his reticence to gruffness. I have 
the feeling, but no proof, that we are nearest to 
the truth of the matter, and that somewhere In the 
dim region of the soul's darkness the converging 
lines of modesty, of love and of worship do meet 
at a common point. 



218 



THE FRIENDLY UNIVERSE 

WHEN we use the word Fate or Destiny we 
usually connote something gloomy and 
dread. Its picture to us is such as Arnold 
Boecklin might paint. When we speak of the 
Universe we have some such notion as Carlyle's 
Herr Teufelsdroech had as he neared the nadir of 
The Everlasting No — " A huge, immeasurable 
Steam Engine, rolling on in Its dead indifference 
to grind me limb from limb." 

But this is all unjust and irrational. A man is 
never going to be genuinely content until he makes 
friends with the Universe. Destiny is kinder 
than Man. Fate is loving. Death is not a bony 
skeleton, heartless, with a scythe for all sweetness 
and light; Death is a mothering thing, with a 
feathered breast. 

The reason I know this is that joy is the law 
of all conscious vitality. If Destiny were vicious 
life would mean pain. The pleasures of living 
infinitely outweigh the sorrows. We magnify 
evil. We dramatize calamity. Tragedy is 

219 



HUMAN CONFESSIONS 

news. And all the while the great ocean of hu- 
manity is happy in its deeps. 

Whatever mind lurks behind the universe is a 
Father and not a Judge Jeffreys. If there be an 
all-seeing Eye, it is kindly, and not a huge, glaring 
detective eye. To me the Universe is a homy 
place, the stars are sociable, humanity is lovable 
and the grave is a resting bed where I shall go to 
sleep pillowed upon morning hopes. 



220 



LOVE 

THERE is something in every man's heart, 
said Goethe, which, if wc knew it, would 
make us hate him. Nothing gives such a shudder 
as to discover this strain of baseness in a friend. 
Sometimes we live for years in more or less inti- 
mate contact with a person only to find some fatal 
day his spot of inward cowardice. It is to con- 
ceal this little grain of coarseness that we maintain 
our reserve with all people. Society's conven- 
tions and formalisms preserve our mutual respect 
for one another by holding us a proper distance 
apart. Love is the only liquor that can render us 
insensible to the innate offensiveness that is in 
every personality. Therefore marriage, the 
closest relationship possible between human beings, 
is unbearable without love. But with love, sweetly 
blinding, transforming and coloring, the repulsive 
is glorified. If God were simply infinite wisdom 
He would spew the human race with its disgusting 
qualities out of His mouth; but He is infinite 
Love, and love has the eye that sees the winning 
wonder and secret beauty of all lives, even the 
worst. The devil knows us, but God loves us. 

221 



THE TRUTH 

THE late O. Henry said that he longed to see 
a book that told the truth: everything in 
literature, he added, was posing, unreality, done 
to please somebody. But he wanted the impos- 
sible. We could no more endure naked truth than 
naked bodies. Our northern, heavily clothed 
civilization has developed morbidly sensitive skin, 
also morbidly sensitive selfhood. What a dif- 
ferent thing the Greek self-consciousness must have 
been from ours. To a Pericles self meant a God- 
made torso and limbs; to the man of to-day self 
means a frock coat and trousers. I have a feeling 
that our race will never grow a right respect for 
truth, a worship and appreciation of the beauty of 
things as they are, until we outgrow the clothes 
habit. The curse of religion is respectability; of 
literature, decency; of thought, mob-dominancy. 
But what can you expect of people who are taught 
as children that to be real is to be naughty? It 
would take a thousand years of self-expression to 
cultivate a universal desire for truth. Books do 
not tell the truth because nobody would read them. 

222 



OLD JOY 

THOSE dark ages, which we are used to think 
so wretched, when society, as Symonds says, 
existed upon a dung-heap, must after all have been 
happy, because there were so many walls, prisons 
and barriers to restrain happiness. And our 
twentieth century will certainly appear to the thir- 
tieth century very unhappy, because we are so 
furious to stimulate happiness. Our literature 
teems with exhortations against the folly of 
worry and despair. In books, theaters, pulpits 
and schools we are continually crying, cheer up I 

Human joy is very old. Mornings were 
steeped in dew and streams gurgled and trees 
waved and flowers nodded and the sun shone all 
about the children In the courtyard of Rameses and 
the young men and maids of Athens, and the pair- 
ing lovers in the days of Lorenzo the Magnificent. 
War, caste, religious bigotry, tyranny and igno- 
rance could not dry up the streams of human zest 
in life. 

Is not our age of dollars most perilous of all? 
Is not the God of Getting On the most Philistine 
of gods, sucking humanity dry? 

223 



CHRISTMAS CHRISTIANITY 

THERE have been many varieties of Chris- 
tianity since the day when Christ brought 
the original, genuine article to the world. But 
the very best kind of all is Christmas Christianity. 
The quintessence of the Christian religion is 
agreeableness. We have had all kinds of faith, 
orthodox and heretic, cave-dwelling, crusading, 
cathedral-building, protesting, conforming, plain 
and complicated, ritualistic and crude; and if you 
get confused and want to know what really the 
true faith Is, an excellent plan is simply to try and 
make the people about you happy. I will not say 
that will save your soul, for I am not authorized 
to decide here upon so important a matter ; but if 
causing joy and light in hearts near you be not a 
saving act and the essence of salvation, certain 
it is at least that such actions have the flavor and 
the odor of Heaven. 

Once a year wc leave the doubts and doctrines 
about Jesus and simply feel His personality. 
What a pity that we cannot take the Christmas 
feeling and butter it all over the dry year I 

224 



^ 



TRUE LOVE 



ALL the old English ballads sing, not of love, 
but of true love. It Is monogamic fidelity 
that is singable. Doubtless men have enjoyed 
their harems and lady light-o'-loves have their 
pleasures. But that sort of thing never gets into 
the poetry of the people. " Douglas, Douglas, 
tender and true," is sung by every pair of turtle 
doves of honest mind. The rhapsodies of Thais, 
Lais and Sappho are nibbled In seclusion. The 
cause Is not wholly the Influence of Christianity. 
It is rather psychological. The highest type of 
affection is between two, and exclusive. Bulwer- 
Lytton says that to a man who truly loves a woman 
there is something a bit repellent or distasteful In 
any other woman. As loyalty Is the highest flavor 
of love, so disloyalty brings to the heart Its most 
terrible bitterness, a feeling like death. The best 
of all to a lover is not that he can bring that light 
into her face and that thrill Into her blood, but that 
no other man can. Love, as a mere pleasure, 
palls; It Is a brother to cruelty. Loyal love out- 
lasts the fires of youth, warms old age, scorns 
death and endures In heaven. 

225 



THE HUMAN TANGLE 

WE are always overrating one another's 
mental clearness. We ascribe distinct 
motives where there is only confusion. All men 
are obscurest to themselves. " Why did he do 
such a thing?" Generally he has not the 
slightest idea. If he gives a clear reason It is 
probably one he thought of later. Most things 
are done " just because." The woman's reason 
Is psychologically the truest. How many young 
persons marry, not from any wise and counseled 
plan, but In a bewilderment of passion and igno- 
rance ! The great decisions of humanity spring 
from obscure impulses. Logic, reason and the 
light come afterward and criticise. It Is blind In- 
stinct that creates. The big universe Is too much 
for us. Events are a tangle. Our own hearts 
are deep, holding strange monsters. The body 
may walk. The soul gropes. As we grow older 
we get toward God's point of view, as old Arkel, 
In Maeterlinck's " Pelleas and Mehsande," said: 
" SI j'etais DIeu, j'aurais pitle du coeur des 
hommes — If I were God, I should have pity 
upon the heart of men." 

226 



LUXURY AND DEMOCRACY 

HUMANITY has never had splendor 
enough. The fault lies in that its glory has 
3een based upon injustice. Kings and nobles 
feasted while peasants starved. Millionaires now 
ive in luxury while workmen live in penury. But 
those who think that democracy will mean a dead 
evel of commonplace are mistaken. There has 
3een no magnificence in the world comparable to 
what will be the magnificence of the people, when 
once we get society upon the foundations of jus- 
tice. We shall have parks vaster than any royal 
^reserves, art galleries richer than any ducal col- 
lection, municipal theaters and concert gardens 
more costly and perfect than any millionaire group 
ever dreamed, besides food, drink and clothing 
more delightful than the past has ever known. 
Luxury, display, finery and all brave show need 
only be produced in terms of democracy and jus- 
tice, and they cease to be wrong. Some day we 
shall beautify the whole city instead of merely the 
quarters of the rich. 

227 



FACING THE DAY 

WHAT we want to know about Socrates is 
not what he said upon such and such an 
occasion, but how he felt in the morning. How 
did he front life each day after his bath of death? 
It is not so important to know a man's evening 
opinion; it is a poor raveled affair after having 
been bandied about by the rough facts of a day. 
In the evening a man is expedient; in the morn- 
ing he is heroic. Morning thoughts are primal, 
night thoughts are gray and steeped in confusion. 
The mind runs down; it must be dipped in death 
about once every twenty-four hours. In the 
morning you have the individual, at nightfall 
comes the institution, society, convention. Gh, 
for just one morning's intimacy with Wagner, 
with Dante, with Horace Bushnell, with Jesus! 
To know them, and not opinions about them! 
For a man is greater than anything he does, even 
as God is greater than His stars. 



228 



INDEX 

PAGE 

Accuracy 153 

Agreer, The 199 

Air 121 

Alone 127 

Art and Democracy iii 

Aura, The 13 

Auricle and Ventricle 107 

Belief and Fancy 191 

Benumbing Infinite, The 207 

Between One Man and One Woman 35 

Brotherhood 179 

Carrying the Lantern Behind Them 29 

Catching Step 117 

Christmas Christianity 224 

Church, The ^^ 

Cinderella 185 

City, The 169 

Commercialism 21 

Common Stock 59 

Courage 53 

Danger 9 

Defenders of the Faith, The 57 

Democracy and Wealth 159 

Desires i6s 

Destroyers, The 137 

229 



INDEX 

PAGE 

Editing Life 55 

Essentials 123 

Ethics of the Intellect 119 

Expediency 89 

Facing the Day 228 

Failures 97 

Faith 27 

Force Till Right is Ready 211 

Four Clock Strokes of History, The 167 

Friendly Universe, The 219 

Friendship of Women, The 41 

Fullness 105 

Government and Morals 143 

Growth of Ideals 47 

Happiness 125 

Here 95 

Heredity 203 

Heretics 139 

History of Thought, The 147 

Human Tangle, The 226 

Ideals 129 

Imagination 115 

Impossible, The 67 

Individual and Institution 195 

Inefficiency 177 

Institution, The 187 

Introspection 113 

Invisible, The 103 

Is Religion Declining ? 171 

Knowledge , 7p 

230 



INDEX 

PAGE 

Life and Literature 213 

Life and Love 25 

Life's Real Object 61 

Love 221 

Love Militant 45 

Love's Tragedy 215 

Luxury and Democracy 227 

Martian Will, A 183 

Meanwhile 155 

Memory 201 

Modesty 217 

Money 141 

Moral Value of the Arts, The 145 

My Familiar 157 

Old Age and Faith 63 

Old Joy 223 

Organization 135 

Our Kind of Folks 81 

Outside the Gates 91 

Paradox, The 23 

Peace of Poise, The 85 

Philistines, The 71 

Piano, The 131 

Plunging into Happiness 69 

Progress 205 

Punishment 209 

Reflected Souls 161 

Reformer, The 19 

Rewards 109 

Saint Vanitas 65 

Sanity and Variation 189 

231 



INDEX 

PAGE 

Self 149 

Self-Expression 33 

Separation 11 

Silence 99 

Sin and Conservatism 193 

Sky, The 17 

Smiles 93 

Soil of Heroism, The 39 

Solitude 51 

Something Else 'jT't 

Sunlit Summits 133 

Talk 87 

Theater, The 163 

Things as They Are loi 

To the Unborn 83 

To You 7 

Training the Will 175 

True Love 225 

Truth, The 222 

Waste of Hate, The 31 

Water ' 49 

Who Paid Tolstoy ? 75 

Wickedest Man, The x-jt, 

Wigwagging 37 

World Consciousness 151 

World's Greatest Need, The 15 

Writer, The 181 

Youth Eternal 43 

Zeitgeist, The 197 



232 

31+77-6 



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